28
ISRAEL AND ZIONISM

"Israel's
claim to the Holy Land rests on the existence of God.
If it was not God's will that
they possessed Canaan, the nations
can reproach them as mere conquering
brigands." -- Herman Wouk, Jewish novelist, p. 186

"Is
Zionism racism? I would say yes. It's a policy that to me looks
like it has very many
parallels with racism. The effect is the same.
Whether you call
it that or not is in a sense irrelevant."
--
Desmund
Tutu, South African Archbishop and activist
against apartheid,

[in
HOFFMAN, p. 15]

"Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.
Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives to try
to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy
cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance." -- Eric Hoffer, The True Believer, 1963, p. 102

"Zionism ... must after Auschwitz be a Christian commitment

as well
[as a Jewish one] ... The post-Holocaust Christian must

repent of the
Christian sin of suppressionism ... Without

Zionism, Christian
as well
as Jewish, the Holy Spirit cannot

dwell between Jews and Christians
in
dialogue ... Christians

after the Holocaust, we have seen, must
be
Zionists on behalf

not only of Jews but also of
Christianity itself."

--

Emil Fackenheim, Jewish author, p. 285, 305

"If
power corrupts, the reverse is also true; persecution corrupts

the victims though perhaps in subtler and more tragic ways."

-- Arthur
Koestler, [in GILMAN, p. 33]

"Is
there anything more common than the transformation of

persecuted into persecutor
... ?

-- Maxime
Rodinson, p. 9

"In
the twentieth century, men -- all of us -- find themselves compelled to commit or condone
evil for the sake of preventing an evil believed to be greater.
And the tragedy is that we do not know whether the evil we condone
will not in the end be greater than the evil we seek to avert--
or be identified with."

-- Emil
Fackenheim, [in BELL, p. 317]

"If
Israelis know about oppression, it is mostly from the
oppressor’s end of the gun
sight."
--
Benjamin Beit Hallahmi, Israeli professor
at Haifa University

"One
of the major problems with Israeli democracy is that it has no constitutional guarantees of human rights. To my
knowledge it's the only functioning democracy without such provision."

--

Asa
Kasher, Israeli philosopher, [in
BRANDT, J., 2000, p. 10]

"Israel
is working on a biological weapon that would harm Arabs but not Jews,
according to Israeli military and western intelligence
sources ... In developing their
"ethno-bomb,"
Israeli scientists are trying to exploit medical advances by identifying
genes
carried by some Arabs, then create a genetically modified bacterium or virus.
The intention is to use the ability of
viruses and certain bacteria to alter the DNA
inside their host's living cells. The
scientists are trying to engineer deadly
micro-organisms that attack only those
bearing the distinctive genes. The
programme is based at the biological
institute in Nes Tziyona, the main research
facility for Israel's clandestine arsenal
of chemical and biological weapons.
A scientist there said the task was hugely
complicated because both Arabs and
Jews are of semitic origin. But he added:
"They have, however, succeeded in
pinpointing
a particular characteristic in the genetic profile of certain Arab
communities, particularly the Iraqi people."
The disease could be spread
by spraying the organisms into
the air or putting them in water supplies.
The research mirrors biological studies
conducted by South African scientists
during the apartheid era and revealed
in testimony before the truth commission.
The idea of a Jewish state conducting
such research has provoked outrage in
some quarters because of parallels with
the genetic experiments of Dr Josef
Mengele, the Nazi scientist at Auschwitz."
-- Uzi Mahnaimi
and Marie Colvin, The Sunday Times [London, 11-15-1998]

"A
good many Israelis see that if conflict with the Arabs

continues,
they are in danger of becoming like the Germans

from 1933 to 1945 -- accomplices
if not perpetrators of

permanent oppression."
-- Norman Birnbaum, Why,
p. M5

"The 'Israeli criterion'
as the key indicator in assessing anti-
Semitism has increasingly been widened. The label of anti-Semite
is no longer limited to those who reject the legitimacy of the

Jewish
state. Criticism of Israeli governmental policies and

actions
has also entered into the calculus ... As the 'Israeli

criterion'
for evaluating anti-Semitism has become broader,

it

has more and more impaled individuals and groups on the
liberal-

to-left
of the political spectrum on the charge of
anti-Semitism."
-- Arthur Liebman, 1986, p. 352

"Nor is there solid
evidence that marginality increases humaneness.
Freud felt that, on the contrary, Jewish history had produced some

negative psychological results. In his essay, 'Some Character Types
Met with in Psychoanalytic
Work,' he discusses the 'exception':
the person who justifies his rebelliousness and claims special
favor to himself by some injury
he has suffered and of which he
considers himself blameless. Such people, Freud notes, often feel
quite justified in injuring others. He refers to Shakespeare's Richard
III as a prime example of the type. In the midst of this discussion
Freud notes:'For reasons which will easily be understood I cannot
communicate very much about these and other case histories.
Nor do I propose to go into the obvious analogy between
deformities of character resulting
from protracted sickness
in childhood, and the behavior of whole nations, whose
past has been full of suffering.'As
[Jewish psychoanalyst]
Theodore Reik points out, thereference is obviously to Jews."
-- Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, 1982, p. 113

"The Holocaust came to be regularly invoked -- indeed,
brandished as a weapon -- in American Jewry's struggles
on behalf of an embattled Israel."
-- Peter Novick, 1999,
p. 145

"A
guy gets interviewed by a top Israeli general to be an Israeli
spy. As a test, the general asks, 'If you had a chance to kill an
Arab or a cat,which
one would you kill first?' ''Why the cat?'
'You're hired!' the general says."
--
Joke told by an ulta-Orthodox Jew to Stephen Bloom,
2001, p. 224

"The
elements of the Jewish heritage that are hostile to non-Jews
have long been known to the
world, and anti-Semitic writings

quote them at length. Until
recently few would have seriously

asserted that these passages
reflect the opinions of Jews in our
own generation. But, when religious
extremists inject a

contemporary relevance into
these passages ... they acquire a

new and dangerous significance.
They provide ammunition for

anti-Semites, who can assert
that the true Jewish character is

revealed not when Jews are
subjugated in Christian or Muslim

societies, but precisely when
they are free. It is in their natural
environment, not in subjugation,
that they dare disclose their
true face, and the nations
of the world must redefine their
attitudes in view of the strong
Jews rather than the impotent

Jews."
-- Yehoshafat
Harkabi, former head of Israeli
military intelligence, p. 179-180

"Only
in fantasies about an all-embracing Jewish conspiracy
did a Jewish banker and a Jewish
anarchist report to the same

boss." -- Stanislaw Krajewski, Jewish-Polish

author,
The Jewish, p. 64

"It
may be the case that [post-Holocaust] the authentic Jewish

agnostic and the authentic
Jewish believer are closer than at
any previous time."

-- Emil Fackenheim, Jewish theologian, in Sack,
J., p. 135

The central symbol of Jewish identity today
is the nation of Israel, the magnet of international Jewish loyalty and allegiance,
an obsessive attraction that is difficult for most non-Jews to fathom. Ironically,
even relatively few Jewsliving
out of Israel know many details about the Jewish state; large numbers of diaspora
Jews know only the religious or Zionist legends about the place, both views
grounded in the myths of Jewish martyrology
and redemption. "The vast majority of Jews have no familiarity with the
currents of Israeli cultural and even political life," notes Charles
Liebman, ".... Those that are devoted to Israel generally focus on the
external threat [by non-Jewish nations against Israel] rather than the internal
features of Israeli society." [LIEBMAN, Rel Trends, p. 306] "American
Jews ... are not interested or knowledgeable [about Israel] as is frequently
assumed," says Chaim Waxman, "... In a number of surveys of American
Jewish attitudes toward Israel, most of them are quite ignorant not only of
Hebrew but of the basic aspects of Israeli society and culture. In a 1986
national sample, only one-third of American Jews were aware of such elementary
facts as that Menachem Begin and Shimon Peres are not from the same political
party, that Conservative and Reform rabbis cannot officiate weddings in Israel,
and that Arab Israeli and Jewish Israeli children do not generally go to the
same schools." [WAXMAN, p. 136] Ze'ev Chafets, an American Jew who moved
to live permanently in Israel in 1967, notes that

"During the first few months in Jerusalem,
I found I knew very little

about Arabs -- and not much more about
Jews ... In the states I had

been considered pretty Jewish by my friends
... but in Israel I suddenly

found myself little more than a tourist
in what I increasingly wanted to

see as my own country." [CHAFETS,
p. 15-16]

An "age-old ritual" for American
Jews who visit Israel is to pay the Jewish National Fund $10 and plant a tree
in honor or memory of a friend or relative.
Preying on diaspora sentiment, it is a $50 million-per year business.
In 2000 it was discovered by the Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv that workers
at the popular Jerusalem planting site "cynically uproot the saplings
planted by tourists to make way for the new day's busloads." [SONTAG,
D., 7-3-2000, p. A4]

"Many American Jews," says Charles
Liebman, a professor in Israel, "... have created their own conception
of Israel. This is the chunk of Israel that they see and/or imagine they see
or they are shown when they visit Israel. Even when they stay for an extended
period of time. I am impressed by how vivid this partial image remains. It
is not an Israel of self-serving and inept leaders, of a rude populace, and
... an xenophobic culture. Rather, it is a society that excludes universalist
sentiment wrapped in symbols of Jewish particularism." [LIEBMAN, p. 309]
For most Jews, notes Adam Garfinkle, "Israel is more of an icon than
a real place [GARFINKEL, p. 144] ... The Jewish sensibility and the Israeli
sensibility is suffused with metaphors of chosenness, slavery, exile (galut),
wandering in the wilderness, liberation, a covenant over the land of Israel,
and the redemption of it, that resound from Biblical narratives." [GARFINKEL,
p. 22]

Many prominent Zionists have restrained,
or hidden, fundamental Jewish ethnocentric sentiments to declare pan-human
messianic statements about the Jewish state that are, in historical context,
as we shall soon see, ludicrous. "Zionism," insisted Solomon Goldman,
president of the Zionist Organization of America, "... became a demonstration
without parallel of the creative power of justice and democracy." [GAL,
A., 1986, p. 381]

Over time, notes Jonathan Sarna, "the
Zion [Israel] of the American Jewish imagination, in short, became something
of a fantasy land: a seductive heaven-on-earth, where enemies were vanquished,
guilt assuaged, hopes realized, and deeply felt longings satisfied."
[SARNA, A Proj, p. 41-42] Marc
Ellis, in discussing the work of Israeli author Avishai Margalit, notes that

"In the Jewish context a glimpse of
Masada, or the Wall, or the

Temple Mount is enough to move the 'Jewish
heart,' and the

marketing of Israel takes full advantages
of these images. Kitsch

can also be politicized and become, in Margalit's
terms, part of

state ideology whose 'emblem is total innocence.'"
[ELLIS, M., 1990,

p. 34]

Colin Shindler notes the widespread Jewish
American efforts to mythify the Jewish homeland and control its depiction
in the world mass media:

"The 'Israel' that was promoted [after
1967] tended to be one of unreal,

utopian dimensions, where public relations
had replaced reality ...

Obsession with the media spawned new organizations,
expensive

consultants and vigilante journalists to
cope with real and imaginary

anti-Israel bias in the press." [SHINDLER,
p. 96-97]

In 2001, during an extended Palestinian uprising against
Israel occupation, when Israeli brutality against Palestinians was becoming
difficult to veil, the Jewish state hired a New York public relations company
-- Rubenstein Associates -- to control popular perceptions about the place.
To improve israel's image, Rubenstein suggested less security guards around
prime minister Ariel Sharon and painting Israeli weapons used on Palestinian
rioters orange "to make it clear to television viewers that solders are
firing nonlethal rounds." Cleaning up after Arab riots was also thought
to make for a better image on TV. "But Palestinian officials and young
boys interviewed at the Ayosh junction in the West Bank town of Ramallah,"
noted the Baltimore Sun, "one place singled out by Rubenstein as a problem
area, say the proposals prove Israel would rather save face than save lives."
[HERMANN, P., 6-29-01]

An Israeli scholar, Boaz Evron, notes that
many American Jews "feel ... an obligation toward Israel ... Israel,
for them, is not ... a political space devoted to the continuation of a normal
national life, but a historical revenge ... [EVRON, p. 110-112] ... Perhaps
a main factor in Israel's psychological hold on the Jewish Diaspora is that
part of the Diaspora that has lost its religious framework but has remained
locked within the Jewish caste and uses Israel as a means of venting its complexes
by proxy. These Jews imagine themselves to be part of the Israeli people,
while maintaining their own comfortable existence in the Diaspora ... thus
Israel deliberately helps Diaspora Jews maintain an illusory existent identity.
It is in the obvious interests of the Israeli leadership to prevent such an
honest self-appraisal which might lead to a different, genuine Jewish identity."
[EVRON, p. 112]

Jewish American commentator Joyce Starr
notes that

"American Jews may talk about Israel
extensively, petition on the nation's

behalf, and give generously from their bank
accounts, but this does

not mean they 'know' Israel. American Jews
read voraciously about

the country and are familiar with the Dead
Sea, Jerusalem, and the Green

Line [that separates Israel from the West
Bank]. Yet the human

perspective is all but out of reach."
[STARR, 1990, p. 147]

In paraphrasing the comments of the chairman
of the North American Jewish Forum, Starr also asserts that the American Jewish-Israel
relationship

"was built with the consent of the
leadership in both places for their

own convenience. Israel needed emigration,
as well as political and

financial support, whereas American Jewry
was engrossed in establishing

the infrastructure of a burgeoning Jewish
community in the United States.

The way to accomplish both objectives was
to build a black-and-white

stereotype of Israel as either an idealized
society or as a society with

In 1998, Rabbi Marvin Hier (of Simon Wiesenthal
Center/Museum of Tolerance fame) censored an in-house movie at his Moriah
Films center. Entitled "A Dream No More," the film was scheduled
to be shown at various sites on the occasion of Israel's fiftieth anniversary
celebration. Hier scrapped the project because it wasn't flattering enough
to the Jewish state. To the film's directors (Mark Harris and Stuart Schoffman),
noted the Jerusalem Post, "the demise of Dream reflects,
at bottom, the unwillingness of American Jews to face the realities of Israeli
life and history as a mixture of light and shadow." [TUGEND, T., 11-16-98,
p. 7]

"Zionism conjured up a grand vision
of ardent young men and women earnestly engaged in the selfless task of creating
and new and better humanity," says Jonathan Sarna, "This utopian
view of Zionism, linked as it was both to the self-image of American Jews
and to their highest religious aspirations, had less and less to do with the
realities of the Middle East ... All of the historic American Jewish images
of Israel -- from the early image of agrarian pioneers, to the twentieth-century
image of the 'model state' -- spoke to the needs of
American Jews and reflected
their ideals and fantasies, rather
than the contemporary realities of Jewish life in the land of Israel."
[SARNA, J., p. 58]

"Israel became a wellspring for a
variety of enriching experiences and myths," says Sylvia Barack-Fishman,
"-- paradoxically, making American Jews feel both more Jewish and more
physically empowered in the western world." [BARACK-FISHMAN, p. 277] "If American Jews were denied ... opportunities to act out vigilance for
Israel," wonders Israeli Bernard Avishai, "what would be left of
their Judaism? ... Is it possible that American Jews now need to invent anti-Semites
to feel like Jews?" [AVISHAI, B., p. 353]

As Israeli Boas Evron observes:

"When you try to explain to American
Jews that we [Israelis] are not,

in fact, in danger of annihilation [from
Arabs], that for many years to

come we will be stronger than any possible
combination, that Israel

has not, in fact, been in danger of physical
annihilation since the first

cease-fire of the War of Independence in
1948, and that the average

human and cultural level of Israeli society,
even in its current

deteriorated state, is still much higher
than that of the surrounding

Arab society, and that this level rather
than the quantity and

sophistication of our arms constitutes our
military advantage --

you face resistance and outrage. And then
you realize another

fact: this image is needed by many American
Jews in order for

them to free themselves of their guilt regarding
the Holocaust.

Moreover, supporting Israel is necessary
because of the loss of

another focal point to their Jewish identity
... They need to

feel needed. They also need the 'Israeli
hero' as a social and

emotional compensation in a society in which
the Jew is

not usually perceived as embodying the characteristics
of

the tough, manly fighter. Thus, the Israeli
provides the

American Jew with a double, contradictory
image -- the

virile superman, and the potential Holocaust
victim -- both of

whose components are far from reality."
[ELLIS, M., 1990,

p. 37]

"American Jews aren't usually aware
of their ignorance about us," an Israeli "intellectual" told
(new Jewish American immigrant to Israel) Wendy Orange on her sixth night
in the Jewish state, "Why do you people
alwayssuperimpose your fantasies on
our reality?" [original author's
emphases: ORANGE, W., 2000, p. 25] Jewish
American Joyce Starr recalls addressing an audience of "major donors of one of the largest American
Jewish organizations" and making the mistake of mentioning some problems
in Israel. "The hostess of the event," notes Starr, "became
visibly furious ... So glacial was the reception [to me] ... An elderly grandmother-type
finally took pity on my shock and confusion. 'Darling, you must understand,'
she comforted. 'Everything you said is true, but you never should have said
it here.'" [STARR, J., 1990, p. 140]

"I used to conduct a program involving
UJA-Federation young leadership types, called 'Images of Israel,'" says
Jonathan Woocher, "It was kind of a Thematic Apperception Test, using
photographs to elicit responses regarding attitudes towards Israel. What has
always astounded me was the enormous range of values, attitudes, and emotions
that American Jews were projecting onto Israel -- Israel the heroic, Israel
the threatened, Israel the bearer of ancient traditions, and so on. To be
sure, those are pieces of the reality, but the responses were more interesting
for what they revealed of the respondents: indeed, Israel was being used to
help American Jews make sense of their own identity. To me that is clearly
something which is not a basis for a healthy relationship." [WOOCHER,
1990, p. 33]

The large numbers of Jews from Israel living
in the United States are even a source of aggravation for some American Jews,
whose myths prefer that the emigrants remain happy in the Jewish homeland
as role-model Zionists. "American Jews," says Israeli Moshe Shokeid,
"... are bewildered by the presence of Israelis in their midst ... American
Jews who want to restore the categories and definitions which constitute the
order and values of the respective Israeli, Jewish, and Zionist identities,
employ a subtle strategy: they ignore the
yordim [Israelis in America], they avoid associating with them, and
express that disdain and resentment as much as their code of civility allows."
Some American Jews refer to Israelis in America as "Fish," "the
abbreviations stand for 'fucking Israeli shithead.'" [SHOKEID, 1998,
p. 507]

By 1981, the World Jewish Congress estimated the number of yordim
in the U.S. to be between 300,000 and 500,000 -- "perhaps one for every
six Israelis living in Israel. They create a difficult situation for Diaspora
Jews, partly because of the yordim's own sense of embarrassment, and
partly because Israel denigrates them and is embarrassed by the undiagnosed
phenomenon they represent." [WALINSKY, L., 1981, p. 67]

Among the most important nationalist legends
in the modern state of Israel (and for many in the international Jewish community)
has been the story of Masada. In Israeli/Jewish lore, 900 Jewish zealots nobly
defended themselves for months against attack and then committed mass suicide
at a remote desert fortress near the Dead Sea in 73 AD rather than surrender
to besieging Roman legions. The Masada tale of desperate Jewish warriors has
popularly been regarded as historical fact and has served as heroic symbol
-- a "last stand" in Jewish collective consciousness, a story where
Jews who were revolting against Roman domination chose to die for their Jewish
heritage rather than suffer oppression at the hands of Gentiles. Masada has
embodied a range of traditional Jewish beliefs: Jewry as a "nation apart" against
all others, the few against the many, Jewish heroism against Gentile hordes,
and dedication to each other to the point of death as itself a noble endeavor.
Masada story has long been a source of Jewish and Israeli pride, especially
since the founding of modern Israel in 1948. "Masada is not just a story,"
notes Israeli historian Nachum Ben-Yehuda, "Masada provides, certainly
for my generation of Israelis, an important ingredient in the very definition
of our Jewishness and Israeli 'identity.'" [BEN-YEHUDA, p. 5]
"Masada," writes Yitzhak Landau in his famous patriotic poem
to Israel and Jewish solidarity, "shall not fall again." [BENVENISTI,
p. 35]

Astoundingly, however, the Masada legend
of courageous Jewish defenders is false. Its historical basis was distorted
and embellished to serve the propagandistic needs of early Israeli nation-building.
Nachum Ben-Yehuda wrote an entire volume in 1995 that catalogues, not only
that the heroic version of the Masada story is not true, but that it was consciously
fabricated to serve Israeli propaganda about Jewish identity, especially in
the early post-Holocaust period when the Jews of Europe were perceived to
have so passively met their fate at the hands of Hitler.

Virtually everything modern scholarship
knows about Masada comes from the writings of Flavius Josephus, a man -- who
born a Jew -- joined the Romans and is generally considered in Jewish circles
to be a traitor to his people (an odd source for heroizing ancient Jewry).
A close reading of him, notes Ben-Yehuda, reveals that the "zealots"
of Masada were actually Sicarri -- "assassins," of both Romans and
Jews. The reason they fled to Masada was, not because they were fighting Roman
domination, but that they were driven out of Jerusalem by fellow Jews. The
Sicarri then "raided nearby Jewish villages, killed the inhabitants,
and took their food." [BEN-YEHUDA, p. 9] They killed about 700 Jews in
Ein Gedi alone, "mostly women and children." [BEN-YEHUDA, p. 36]

From this core of information about Masada's
dubious "defenders" provided by Josephus, Israeli propagandists
"socially constructed a shrine for Jewish martyrdom and heroism"
[BEN-YEHUDA, p. 190] whereby the entire nation of modern Israel was itself
conceived as a Masada, isolated defenders against gentile hostility towards
Jews everywhere, "a symbol of the heroism of Israel for all generations
... [BEN-YEHUDA, p. 87] ... Masada
was not destroyed. It became a symbol of the Jewish will to live as a nation,
of refusal to surrender to the forces threatening its extinction." [
BEN-YEHUDA, p. 123] "In the late fifties and early sixties," says
Meron Benvenisti, "Masada became a national shrine." [BENVENISIT,
p. 38]

Yet, "the Masada mythical narratives,"
adds Ben-Yehuda, "was consciously invented, fabricated, and supported
by key moral entrepreneurs and organizations in the Yishuv [Israeli community]
... [BEN-YEHUDA, p. 307] ... [While Masada's defenders were really] "thieves
and assassins who robbed and killed other Jews." [BEN-YEHUDA, p. 300]
For years, Israeli army recruits were taken to the ruins of the Masada fortress
to swear allegiance to the Jewish state, ritually stating "endless devotion"
to Israel at this "place of splendor, glory and majesty." [BEN-YEHUDA,
p. 147] And Israeli newspaper in 1964 called Masada Israel's "most cherished
national asset" and the "mausoleum of the saints of the nation."
[BEN-YEHUDA, p. 185] A popular patriotic slogan became "Masada shall
not fall again." The Mossad's assassination division was even called
"Masada."

Home of a band of fleeing Jewish murderers
or not, the Masada story has not been without its Jewish critics on other
terms. The idea of Israel itself as a veritable Masada country, a garrison
state with a desperate back-to-the-wall "we against them" worldview
(sometimes described as the "Masada complex") has worried some Israeli
commentators. Is collective suicide an appropriate role model for any people?
How would this affect Israeli self-conception and behavior in the nuclear
bomb world? Is an alienated "last stand" psychology a healthy premise
to interact with the rest of the world? Seymour Hersh quotes the comments of an 'expert who has been involved
in government studies on the nuclear issue in the Middle East for two decades:
"Israel has a well thought-out nuclear strategy and, if sufficiently
threatened, they will use it." [HERSH, S., p. 92] "Many senior nonproliferation officials
in the American government," adds Hersh, "were convinced by the
early 1990s that the Middle East remained the one place where nuclear weapons
might be used [i.e., no other Middle Eastern country
has nuclear weapons except Israel]." [HERSH, p. 92]

"Our nationalists are leading us to
Masada," once complained famed tank commander Yitzhak Ben-Ari, "in
the sense that 'all the world is against us. We shall fight, and if we have
a nuclear bomb, we shall use it.' And what will remain for us? Nothing."
[BEN-YEHUDA, p. 157] "It is unavoidable,"
worried Israeli historian Benyamin Kedar, "that [nationalist] behavior
influenced by identification with Masada will indeed resuscitate it. If the
entire world is against us, then one begins to behave as if we are against
the entire world and such behavior is bound to lead to ever-increasing isolation."
[BEN-YEHUDA, p. 246]

It is clear that this Masada model is, of
course, merely a secular, militant expression of the traditional religious
"nation apart" syndrome itself, Jewish enclaves throughout history
self-ghettoized against the non-Jewish Other. And as for the Masada myth itself,
"time after time," notes Ben-Yehuda, Jews who are told that the
Masada story of heroism is fake "elicit expressions ranging from mild
discomfort to (much more frequently) anger and open hostility. My worse encounters
have typically been with [Israeli] history teachers ... Obviously, the realization
that a major element of one's personal and national identity was based on
a biased and falsified myth is not an easy thing to deal with." [BEN-YEHUDA,
p. 311]

Among the many forms of Masada mythologizing,
in this case for American popular consumption, was a 1970 "historical
novel," Masada, subtitled A Novel of Love, Courage, and the
Triumph of the Human Spirit, by Ernest Ganz, described by a Kirkus
Reviews reviewer as "a return to the days of heroes larger than life."
It was also the subject of an "8-hour TV epic from ABC-TV and
Universal." [GANN, back cover and opening page] The Masada myth also
saw American expression in 1987 when Jewish American Marvin David Levy, recently
released after a two year prison term for his role in a drug smuggling ring,
watched the Chicago Symphony Orchestra perform his "dramatic oratorio,
Masada, in its newly expanded version." The work, noted the Chicago
Tribune, "emphasizes the triumph and tragedy of a heroic band that
chose individual liberty at great personal cost." [VON RHEIM, J., p.
26]

"Israel is the ultimate reality in
the life of every living Jew today. I believe

that Israel surpasses in importance Jewish
ritual. It is more than the

Jewish tradition; and, in fact, it is more
than the Mosaic law itself. The

anti-religious Jew who supports Israel is
welcomed as a Jew and as

an integral part of the community. The observant
Jew who does not

accept the centrality of Israel is not accepted
and is rarely even

tolerated. In dealing with those who oppose
Israel, we are not

reasonable and we are not rational. Nor
should we be." [ROSENBERG,

M., p. 82]

****************************

While Jews have a deeply internalized millennium-old
mythology about the place, a crucial instrument in formulating a more broadly
favorable opinion about Israel in America among non-Jews is the mass media.
In the 1950s the New York public relations company of Edward Gottleib commissioned
a Jewish author, Leon Uris, to write a novel "to create a more sympathetic
attitude towards Israel." [FINDLEY, p. xxv] This novel, Exodus,
published in 1958, "did more to popularize Israel with the American public,"
says public relations expert Art Stevens, "than any other single presentation
in the media." [FINDLEY, p. xxvi] Until Exodus, most Americans
knew nothing about Zionism or the new nation of Israel. Most still have the
same essential ignorance, but Uris's novel became number one on the New
York Times best seller list for nineteen weeks and became, notes Edward
Tivnan, "the primary source of knowledge about Jews and Americans that
most Americans had." [TIVNAN, P. 51] The New York Times described
the book when it first came out as "a passionate summary of the inhuman
treatment of the Jewish people in Europe, the exodus in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries to Palestine, and the triumphant founding of the new Israel."
[TIVNAN, p. 51] This "new Israel" was founded out
of a victorious war against Arab armies in 1948. "In books, movies, and
TV shows in the 1950s and 1960s," says Stephen Green, "the Jewish
state was depicted as having defeated the Arabs against overwhelming odds,
contrary to virtually every professional strength estimate of the opposing
forces that were made at the time of the war itself." [GREEN, S, p. 75]

"Shortly before the outbreak of [the 1967] war in June, President Lyndon
Johnson's intelligence experts debated whether it would take a week or ten
days for Israel to demolish its enemies." [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 148]

The hardcover Exodus edition was
still in print in the 1990s; a paperback edition was still going strong at
its sixty-third printing. Uris, a high school drop-out who flunked three English
classes and joined the marines at the age of seventeen, is boldly self-referential
in a later novel, Mitla Pass (1988). Here an Israeli official says
to the novel's main character, a Jewish author, that "this would be the
first American novel about Israel. It could be valuable in gaining favorable
world opinion." [URIS, L., Mitla, p. 304] In real life, even David
Ben Gurion, one of Israel's most revered prime ministers, said that "as
a piece of propaganda [Exodus] is still the greatest thing ever written
about Israel." [WHITFIELD, p. 77] "Although propaganda novels have
occasionally punctuated the history of United States mass taste," writes
Stephen Whitfield, "Exodus was unprecedented." [WHITFIELD,
p. 77] The prominent Jewish novelist, Saul Bellow, observed that "admittedly,
some people say Exodus was not much of a novel, but it was extraordinarily
effective as a document and we need such documents now. We do not need stories
like those of [fellow Jewish novelist] Philip Roth which expose unpleasant
Jewish traits." [WHITFIELD, p. 79]

Then came the Hollywood film based on the
novel. "Uris had the blessings
of Hollywood before he wrote the book," notes Stephen Whitfield, "MGM
had commissioned a novel about the birth of the Third Jewish Commonwealth
[modern Israel] because it expected that a best seller would lengthen the
lines at the box office." [WHITFIELD, p. 164] Pat Boone sang, "This
land is mine, God gave it to me" in the Exodus sound track and
there was such media-enflamed interest in the subject that Israel's El Al
airlines created a 16-day tourist package that led visitors on a pilgrimage
to the sites where Otto Preminger made his movie. [WHITFIELD, p. 79] "People are the same no matter what they're
called," says Eva Marie Saint in the movie. "Don't believe it,"
replies Paul Newman, "People have the right to be different." [WHITFIELD,
p. 164] "In Exodus," notes Whitfield, "[the Jewish hero]
battles not for the cause of democracy, nor for some cosmopolitan ideal of
brotherhood, but as an unabashed [Jewish] nationalist." [WHITFIELD, p.
164]

The book has sold, to date, over 20 million
copies. [BREINES, p. 56] "All
my life I've heard I'm supposed to be a coward because I'm a Jew," the
American Jewish captain of the ship, the Exodus, tells a Gentile nurse in
the novel, "Let me tell you, kid. Every time the Palmach [a Jewish military
branch in Palestine] blows up a British depot or knocks the hell out of some
Arabs he's winning respect for me. He's making a liar out of everyone who
tells me Jews are yellow. The guys over there are fighting my battle for respect
... understand that?" [CHAFETS, p. 218] The real-life Israeli captain,
Yeheil Aranowicz, of the blockade-running ship, the Exodus, upon which
the novel is based, was subsequently quoted as saying that "the type
[of characters in the novel] never existed in Israel. The novel is neither
history or literature." Informed of Captain Aranowicz's authoritative
judgements, Uris responded, "Captain who? And that's all I have to say.
I'm not going to pick on a light weight. Just look at my sales figures."
[BREINES, p. 55] Whatever the case,
says Edward Tivnan, "the Israel of most Americans, including Jews, is
still the Exodus version." [BREINES, p. 56]

As
Israeli writers Herbert Russcol and Margalit Banai noted in 1970 about the
(overwhelmingly Jewish) illusory depictions of Israel:

"

It
may be better to rely upon the views of foreign [non-Israeli] observers,
but
most of them are too sympathetic [to Israel].
Their hearts are in the right
places and they love us too much to see us
plain. They are blinded by their
gallant cause. In all the books written about
Israel by outsiders there are
never whores or alcoholics or greedy bankers
or black marketeers. There
are only hero-farmers with a plow in one hand
and a rifle in the other. We
emerge from their pages rather like the cloth-dolls-of-Israel
types which
are sold in the souvenir shops of Jerusalem
and Tel Aviv -- here is the happy
kibbutznik, the attractive girl soldier, the
earlocked Jerusalemite, the quaint new
immigrant from Yemen." [RUSSCOL/BANAI,
1970, p. x]

Such views still persist, dominantly, with
the widespread help of an institutionalized suppression of counter views to
the alleged Israeli reality. Results of a 1987 Roper Poll during the Intifada
[Palestinian uprising] era, noted a Jewish scholar, "reveal positive
attitudes towards Israel and American Jews on the part of the American public."
These findings "are consistent with previous Roper results, [and] suggest
that recent events, including the Iran-Contra affair, the Ivan Boesky insider
trading scandal, and the Jonathan Pollard spy case have had little negative
fall-out as far as attitudes towards Israel and American Jews are concerned."
[TOBIN, p. 50] Jewish pollster Lewis Harris noted in an interview in 1986
that "support for Israel is high despite all the controversies, just
as it's always been. At present, 78% of Americans feel very warm to Israel."
[TOBIN, p. 51] In the Jewish community itself, during the Intifada, "at
the largest annual meeting of American Jews, the General Assembly of the Council
of Jewish Organizations ... the Intifada was scarcely more than a side issue
on the agenda." [STARR, J., 1990, p. 199]

In 1979, Edward Said, a prominent Palestinian-American
professor at Columbia University, was troubled by the growing use of Jewish
Holocaust mythologies in the media towards latent political ends:

"Anyone who watched the spring 1978
NBC presentation of

Holocaust [by Graham Greene] was aware
that at least part of

the program was intended as a justification
for Zionism -- even

while at about the same time Israeli
troops in Lebanon produced

devastation, thousands of civilian casualties,
and untold suffering."

[SAID, Palestine, p. 55]

More generally, Jewish anti-Zionist Alfred
Lilienthal condemned the dominant pro-Israel slant in the American mass media:

"In a bit of serendipitous timing, the
rebirth of the state of Israel and the

establishment of a nationwide network television
in America took place

in the same year, 1948. Since then, these
two phenomena have been

inextricably linked, as scores of television
dramas, comedies, and

mini-series have turned to Israel and its
stunning and turbulent history

for subject matter. Many of these images
have continued to be in the

tradition of popular television, which has
generally portrayed Jewish

themes in a positive light ... [PEARL/PEARL
p. 173] ... A sense of

admiration for the Jewish state informs nearly
all portrayals of

Israel on American popular television over
the past fifty years ...

Confidence in Israel's ability to survive
and thrive, and praise for

its doing so, permeates television's portrayal
of Israel in a way

that has seen little, if any, wavering or
hesitation from the earliest

years of network television until the present
time. Almost invariably,

these depictions include the expressing of
much admiration by

non-Jews for Israel's heroism, achievements,
and pioneer spirit."

[PEARL/PEARL p. 193]

After Israel's Six Day War with Arab states
in 1967, notes Amnon Rubenstein, "the reaction of the world press was
so overtly pro-Israel ... that it worried western diplomats in Arab capitals
and forced Arab propagandists to radically alter their stand vis-a-vis the
Jewish state." [RUBENSTEIN, A., p. 158] Leon Hadar notes in overview that

"Many of the same American Jews
who led the fight against US

intervention in Vietnam, and supported
an unconditional withdrawal

of US forces, ignore or defend the long
and bloody Israeli

occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and
the mistreatment of

Palestinian population there.

How have most supporters of Israel in the United States avoided

dealing with their own political inconsistencies?
The answer lies

in their personal image-maintenance methods
designed to avoid

the cognitive dissonance between their
perceptions of Israel and

its reality. That, and an American media
that for many years

sympathized with the Israeli point of view,
has helped them to

preserve the Israeli fantasy." [HADER,
p. 27]

In Stephen Green's research of documents
at the United States National Center for a book about the founding of the
state of Israel, he noted that "the reality was so different from the
myth as to be unrecognizable ... Selective historical knowledge has led to
fundamental false impressions in America about Israel and about the Middle
East dispute generally." [GREEN, p. 10-11]

Another of the endless mythologies surrounding
Israeli society is the enforced illusion that women fare better against male
sexist-mores in the Jewish state. Israel has long propagated the symbols of
young, noble women working the farm fields and female soldiers in the Israeli
army. Lesley Hazelton, in her book Israeli Women: The Reality Behind the
Myths, is among those who have severely deflated such propaganda. "Myths
compel respect, not necessarily by their truth, but because they are needed
by those who believe in them," she says.

"It is not a rational need, certainly
not a conscious need: but it is often

vital, since myths lay the basis for society's
perceptions of itself, for its

collective identity and the identity of
every member in it ... The liberation

of Israeli women is such a myth. For nearly
three decades Israeli women

have been the paradigm of women's liberation
... They have made an

essential contribution to Israel's self-image
as good and progressive,

the antithesis of its notoriously and cruelly
sexist Arab neighbors ...

But the destructive aspects of this myth
far outweigh its creative

potential for Israeli women ... Their reality
has been subordinated to

the accepted image, and they have been
relegated to the status of

shadows, while the gap continues to widen
between their public image

and their real selves." [HAZELTON,
p. 22]

Herbert
Russcol and Margalit Banai noted in 1970 the status of women in Israeli
society:

"In Israel, today, a wife is still called
by the lowly, pejorative term that the Old
Testament calls hers: isha, woman.
Her husband is still addressed by his
splendid biblical title, ba'al, master.
In the glorious days of the Kings of Israel,

upon
marriage an isha became the physical possession, the chattel, of
her ba'al
along with his handmaidens and slaves, his
ox and his ass. For this reason,

'to
marry a wife' and 'to become master' have the same root meanings in Hebrew.
The infinitive liv'ol, commonly used
in the sacred texts, means bluntly,
and most vulgarly, to possess a woman sexually.
What our fiercely free sabra girl thinks

of
referring to her husband a dozen times
a day as 'my master,' with all the humiliating
connotations described above, may
well be imagined by the reader." [RUSSCOL,
BANAI, 1970, p. 178]

New York Jewish feminist Congresswoman Bella
Abzug was caught off guard when she visited Israel in the same era. Despite
the fact that Israel once had a female prime minister,

"When I was sitting in the Knesset [Israeli
Parliament] I noticed, to my surprise,
that only 8 of the 120 members were women.
One evening I met with some
some of the most outstanding women in the
country and challenged them on
this. The reply I got was that since women
in Israel have equality they don't
need to prove it so much." [ABZUG, B.,
1972, p. 228]

In Israel itself, central propagandizing myths
and blatant historical distortions are only recently being addressed (and
this remains controversial) in that country's school system. In 1999, noted
the New York Times wire services, "new, officially approved textbooks
make plain that many of the most common Israeli beliefs are as much myth as
fact. The new books say, for example, that it was the Israelis who had the
military edge in the War of Independence. The books say that many Palestinians
left their land not -- as has traditionally been taught -- because they smugly
expected the Arab states to sweep back in victory, but because they were afraid
and, in some cases, expelled by Israeli soldiers." [BRONNER, E., Rewriting,
p. 1]

"Only 10 years ago much of this was
taboo," explained Eyal Naveh, a professor of history at Tel Aviv University,
"We were not mature enough to look at these controversial problems. Now
we can deal with this the way Americans deal with Indians and black enslavement.
We are getting rid of certain myths." [BRONNER, E., p. 1]

A 1984 Israeli history text, for example,
from the Israeli Education Ministry stated that (concerning Arab-Israel fighting
from 1939-49), "The numerical standoff between the two sides in the conflict
was horrifyingly unbalanced. The Jewish community numbered 650,000. The Arab
states together came to 400 million. The chances were doubtful, and the Jewish
community had to draft every possible fighter for the defense of the community."
[BRONNER, p. 1]

This traditional Jewish/Israeli view is
only propaganda, a blatant misrepresentation of facts in mythologizing Jewish
heroism and justifying mass expulsions of the Palestinians from their homeland.
One of the new Israeli textbooks today concedes this: "On nearly every
front and in nearly every battle, the Jewish side had the advantage over the
Arabs in terms of planning, organization, operation of equipment, and also
in the number of trained fighters who participated in the battle." [BRONNER,
p. 1]

"Instead of portraying the early Zionists
as pure, peace-loving pioneers who fell victim to Arab hatred," noted
the Times, "the new historians focus on the early leaders' machinations
to build an iron-walled Jewish state regardless of the consequences to non-Jews
living there." [BRONNER, p. 1]

Among long neglected issues only recently
being publicly (albeit guardedly) addressed in America are those of Israeli-instigated
atrocities against Arabs. As Israeli author Meron Benevisti noted in 2000,

"Atrocities and acts of [Jewish] brutality
characterized this period [the

fighting with Arabs to formally create a
Jewish state in 1948]: summary

executions, rape, blowing up houses along
with their occupants, looting

and plundering, and leaving hundreds of
villagers to their own devices

in the fields, without food or water. The
most serious atrocities were

committed in the village of al-Dawayima,
on the western slopes of the

Hebron Highlands ... The occupying [Israeli]
forces indiscriminately

killed between 80 and 100 male villagers,
blew up houses together

with their occupants, murdered women and
children, and committed

rape. According to eyewitness testimony,
these acts were committed

'not in the heat of battle and inflamed
passions, but out of a system

of expulsion and destruction" ....
These atrocities -- which fifty years

later are regarded as libel, invented by
the enemies of Israel, and whose

retelling is perceived as an example of
rewriting history by revisionist

historians -- were, at the time they took
place, known to ministers in

the Israeli government, military commanders,
and even the general

public. The government set up commissions
of inquiry and the army

set
up commissions of its own, but the work of these bodies came

to naught because soldiers and officers
refused to testify against

their comrades in arms." [BENVENISTI,
M., 2000, p. 153]

As Aharon Cizling, the Israeli Minister of
Agriculture at the time, wrote:

"Now Jews too have behaved like Nazis
and my entire being

has been shaken ... Obviously we have to
conceal these actions

from the public, and I agree that we should
not even reveal that

we're investigating them. But they must
be investigated."

[ELLIS, M., 1990, p. 92]

Amos Kenan, a writer for the Israeli newspaper
Yediot Aharonot, once wrote about his experiences on guard duty in
an Arab town in the same era:

"At night, those of us who couldn't
restrain ourselves would go

into the prison compounds to fuck Arab women.
I want very much

to assume, and perhaps even can, that those
who couldn't restrain

themselves did what they thought the Arabs
would have done to

them had they won the war.

Once, only once, did an Arab woman --
perhaps a distant relative

of [head of the Popular Front for the Liberation
of Palestine George]

Habash -- dare to complain. There was a
court martial. The

complainant didn't even get to testify.
The accused, who was

sitting behind the judges, ran the back
of his hand across his

throat, as a signal to the woman. She understood.
The rapist was

not acquitted, he simply was not accused,
because there was no

one who would are accuse him. Two years
later he was killed

while plowing the fields of an Arab village,
one no longer on

the map because its inhabitants scattered
and left it empty."

[ELLIS, 1990, p. 106]

In 1988 Israeli author David Grossman recounts
with shame his meeting with Wadha Isma'il, a Palestinian woman in an Occupied
Territory refugee camp. As a small girl, upon working in the family fields,
Wadha watched Israeli soldiers blindfold her father, and then heard him shot
behind some bushes. "I began to cry," she told Grossman,

"The soldiers who had stayed with me
asked me: Who is that man to

you? I said: 'He is my father.' They said:
'Go to the garden down there,

and you'll see that he is harvesting lettuce
and eggplant.' When I was

some distance from them, I glanced back
and I saw one of the soldiers

aiming his rifle at me. I was frightened
and bent over. His bullet hit

my neck and came out the other side."

"I don't know what to say her,"
writes Grossman, "and she interprets my silence, apparently, as disbelief.
'Look,' she says, and her work-hardened fingers undo her kerchief, and she
smiles a sort of apology about having to bother me with her wound. I see an
ugly scar in back, and another ugly scar in front. Young Hana cries. It seems
that Wadha is her mother. 'Every time I hear that story, it is as if it were
the first time,' Hanan says." [GROSSMAN, D., 1988, p. 70-71]

Israeli professor and Holocaust survivor
Israel Shahak wrote about another set of atrocities by Jews against the Palestinians
during the late 1980s uprising (the "Intifada.") Shahak translated
eyewitness accounts from the Israeli Hebrew press into English. In his introduction
to a compilation of such testimonies, Shahak noted that:

"The systematic use of atrocities,
which in their intensity and the

special intention to humiliate are Nazi-like
and should be compared

to the analogous German Nazi methods, is
intentional and in fact

constitutes the Israeli method for ruling
Palestinians ... There should

be also no doubt that those Nazi-like horrors
can and probably

will become worse, if not stopped from the
outside, and their use

can lead to actual genocide, whether by
'transfer' or extermination.

Indeed, this is one of my reasons for assembling
this collection:

to show that the actual genocide of the
Palestinians in the territories

is now possible, since those Israeli soldiers
and officers who have

committed the outrages recorded here are
capable of anything and

everything." [ELLIS, M., 1990, p. 85]

Such cold realities, so very unwelcome in
mainstream Jewish circles, drastically contrasts with widespread Jewish mythology
about the Israeli army, the beloved Jewish "child-soldiers" as typically
articulated by Elie Wiesel about the 1967 war: "I have seen many armies;
none more humble, more humane in its victories ... My pride is that Israel
has remained human because it has remained so deeply Jewish." [And what
of Wiesel's subtext here, that if one is less "deeply Jewish," one
is less "human?"] [ELLIS, M., 1990, p. 10] American Jewish Zionist historian Melvin Urofsky
articulated the common Jewish view of the noble Israeli army and government
in 1978: "When the War came, Israeli leaders did their best to convince
their Arab neighbors not to run away." [UROFSKY, M., 1978, p. 206] And,
in the aftermath of Israel's 1967 victory over the Arabs, "There is little
to be found in history to compare with the behavior of the Israelis after
the war, their humility, almost sadness, in victory." [UROFSKY, M., 1978,
p. 360] "Few armies, especially in the Arab Middle East," declared
Samuel Katz in 1990, "can boast the high morale and humane standards
displayed by the Israeli soldier." [KATZ, S., 1990, p. 2]

Among the prominent Israeli revisionist
authors in recent years are Benny Morris and Avi Shlaim. "The rise of
revisionist historiography," notes Steven Heydemann, "... reflects
a serious ambivalence about once-deeply held notions of the moral purposes
of Zionism, its position in the Middle East, and the future." [HEYDEMANN,
p. 6] Such Zionist myths have for
decades been unquestioned canon in Jewish circles, widely parroted in America,
only in recent years been subject to increasing scholarly attack
in (but rarely outside) the Jewish state. Such myths include the innately
incorrigible morality of the Zionist enterprise and the conviction that a
large Palestinian populace chose
exodus -- and were not driven --
out of their homeland. More and more Israeli scholars are arriving at the
fact that war with Arabs was not thrust upon the young Jewish nation, but
was part of Zionist objective. Seminal Zionist leader Ben Gurion, says Avi
Shlaim, "grasped that the essential structure of the conflict left no
room for compromise and this would entail the settlement of Zionist claims
by violent means." [HEYDEMANN, p. 23] As Heydemann notes,

decades] in which the exercise of will was
perceived primarily in terms

of power and the application of force. Revisionism
places an emphasis

on the fierce, single-minded way in which
Zionist leaders pursued three

dominant strategic concerns: to expand the
territory under Jewish

control, to reduce the Arab population within
this territory, and to

encourage divisiveness among Arab states
to prevent them from

hindering the attainment of the first two."
[HEYDEMANN, p. 12]

These goals also included "compromise
[with Arabs] as unnecessary in light of Israel's evident military superiority,"
and "indiscriminate whole expulsion of Arab communities, even those which
had lived in peace with their Jewish neighbors." [HEYDEMANN, p. 14]

"The 'exhilarating' possibilities
of a land without Arabs," observes Heydemann, "and the transfer
of Arab farms, houses, and wealth into Jewish hands, set, as Morris reminds
us, in the context of war and massive immigration, quickly overwhelmed the
reservations expressed by minority factions about the morality of expelling
Palestinian Arabs and destroying their villages." [HEYDEMANN, p. 14] "We not only eradicated Arab place names
[in Israel]," notes former Jerusalem deputy mayor Meron Benvenisti, "we
actually destroyed the places as well." [BENVENISTI, p. 196] The Israeli
erasure of Palestinian history was consciously as complete as possible. As
Benvenisti notes

"I was aware for quite some time
that the Palestinian Research

Institute in Beirut was compiling files
on each Palestinian village

in Israel. Since the beginning of the [Lebanon]
war I wondered

about the fate of those files. I was fairly
sure that General [Ariel]

Sharon and General Eitan would search them
out, seize them, and

destroy them in order to complete the eradication
of Arab Palestine.

That is what eventually happened when the
Israeli army entered West

Beirut." [BENVENISTI, p. 198]

Benvenisti also notes the Israeli creation
of a place called "Peace Forest" on the sites of eradicated Arab
villages near Jerusalem, utterly destroyed to guarantee that the inhabitants
never returned. "To call it Peace Forest," he laments, "to
take well-meaning [Jewish] donors and with their money turn all these orchards
into a picnic area for Israelis and tourists is something else entirely. This
betrays not only a lack of sensitivity but is something that must eventually
corrupt our youth ... Dehumanization is a contagious disease." [BENVENISTI,
p. 200-201]

Traditional Israeli reluctance to address
the facts of history even stretches far into the distant past. As Elliot Horowitz
notes about Jewish massacres of Christians in ancient Israel:

"After 1967 the reluctance of Israeli
historians, especially those linked

institutionally to universities and research
institutes, to acknowledge

Jewish violence in the distant past has
become even greater than in

the decades immediately following the Holocaust.
This is true especially

with regard to acts allegedly committed
against non-Jews in the land of

Israel and its environs. One suspects that
the resistance to acknowledging

such phenomena in the past has been related
to a desire on the part of

many Israelis to see themselves as enlightened
and humane occupiers

at present." [HOROWITZ, 1998 p. 8]

***********************************

Israel is a very small nation -- in one
area its width is only about ten miles; more than half of its land mass is
desert. Only one-fifth of the country is arable. The Jewish nation has few
natural resources; potash is one of them. Even limited water supplies loom
as long-term threats to political stability with neighboring water-poor countries.
Most water is pumped from the "Sea" of Galilee and its headwaters;
water crucial to the Jewish state originates
in the heavily Arab West Bank and in southern Lebanon. "Palestinians
in the West Bank and Gaza," notes Amnon Rubenstein, "are routinely
forbidden to dig new wells, deepen existing wells, or put in water systems
that might reduce the water available for Israel." [RUBENSTEIN, A., p.
173] Although Israel is rich in religious lore and tradition, for all practical
economic intents and purposes it is physically resource-less. It must rely
of course upon the massive beneficence of wealthy and influential Jews throughout
the world for help -- economic contributions, but -- more importantly -- world-wide
lobbying efforts of governments and peoples throughout the world to sustain
the Jewish state which can never sustain itself, in drastic contradiction
of seminal Zionist plans for the Jewish state.
Hence, the resources of the rest of the world maintain an economic,
social, and military level for Israel which it could never remotely maintain
by its own means.

Nonetheless, Jewish and Zionist mythology
about the sacredness of the land of Israel has fostered an extremely strange,
and disturbing, paradox. Israeli Amos Oz notes Jewish myth about the actual
land of Israel in Zionist tradition:
"This is ... what some of my teachers taught me when I was a child: after
our Temple was destroyed and we were banished from our Land, the gentiles
came into our heritage and defiled it. Wild Arabs laid the land waste ...
When our first pioneers came to the land to rebuild and be rebuilt by it and
redeem it from its desolation, they found an abandoned wasteland." [OZ,
p. 88]

This is an especially curious myth, given
the fact that the deeds of defiling Gentiles and "wild Arabs" over
all centuries combined can not remotely compare to the atrocious Jewish care
taking of the Holy Land in recent history, in which the modern Israeli military-industrial
state rampantly pollutes the place
so important to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The most visible physical
landmark in the Tel Aviv area, for example, on the outskirts of the city along
the highway to Israel's international airport, is a giant mountain of trash
-- the Hiriya dump. It had been absorbing 3,000 tons of garbage every day
until it was recently closed, but not before the mountain of garbage "collapsed
into the Ayalon River, threatening one of Tel Aviv's sources of drinking water."
[COHN, M., 10-18-98] "As a Zionist," bemoaned professor Harvey Lithwick, "you
can't believe that you came to reclaim the country ... and yet you let the
land go to garbage. For me, that's horrible." [COHN, M., 10-18-98]

In July 1999 one hundred scientists, under
sponsorship of Israel's Economic Forum and the Technion Institute in Haifa,
released a report announcing that Israel's environment was "on the verge
of collapse." The report noted that "underground aquifers suffer
from almost irreversible salination, the quality of air is declining, causing
one in ten children to have asthma, garbage is piling up [and] uncontrolled
construction is eating away at open areas." [AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE, 7-14-99]
That same year London's Financial Times noted that "the
statistics make grim reading. More than half of all untreated industrial waste,
including poisonous chemicals and salts, flows directly into the [Israeli]
environment, damaging underground aquifers, rivers and streams." [FINANCIAL
TIMES, 1-29-99, p. 12] Israel produces 170,000 tons of toxic waste
a year -- two-thirds of it is believed to be dumped illegally throughout the
country and into the Mediterranean Sea. [COHN, M., 10-18-98]

"Zionists -- who passionately reclaimed
these biblical lands after 2,000 years in exile, "noted the Toronto
Star in 1998, "have ... a blind spot about their birthright."
"During the past 50 years," said Israeli environmental activist
Bilha Givon, "all the coasts along Israel have become wasteland, polluted
by factories." In 1997, during Israel's international Jewish sporting
event, the Maccabiah Games, a bridge collapsed over the Yarkon River. Two
Jewish athletes from Australia survived the fall, notes the Star, "only
to die of infection from the polluted river. The scandal over lethal toxins
swirling in the water rocked the Jewish Maccabiah games." [COHN, M.,
10-18-98]

Of particular note, and increasing controversy,
is Israel's official toxic waste dumping ground, Ramat Hovav, located twelve
miles south of Be'er Sheva in the Negev desert. With 43,000 tons of toxic
material a year delivered its way, Ramat Hovav is notorious for mismanagement
and haphazard storage of a variety of dangers. "Within the past twelve months,"
noted the Jerusalem Post in August 1998, "the chairman of the
company that manages the toxic waste site, the site manager, and the site
safety officer have all been fired over safety deficiencies." [COLLINS,
L., 8-7-98, p. 3]

A large community of (Muslim Arab) Bedouin
of the Al-Azameh tribe lives in tents across the street. (Many were forced
to move there after being evicted from their ancestral lands by the Jewish
government). Putrid smells drift through the tents day and night. Environmental Ministry tests in 1994-95, noted
Haim Chertok, noted "dangerous levels of pollution, issuing from organic
waste stewing in Ramat Hovav, more than 40 percent of the time." [CHERTOK,
H., 5-30-97]

Arab workers are also employed in the most
dangerous jobs at the hazardous waste area and in the cluster of pesticide
and chemical factories within Ramat Hovav grounds. Explosions at the Chemgas chemical plant in 1999 injured six workers.
"There are at least six factories, out of 15 at the site," noted
the Jerusalem Post, "where emissions could result in an accident
causing irreversible harm to residents, or even death." [COLLINS, L.,
8-7-97] Mishandling disasters at,
and around, the site are common --
from overturned trucks hauling toxic cargo to leaking storage barrels to explosions
of dangerous chemicals. From 1988 to 1998 there were "ten major incidents"
including "two leaks of poisonous gases within a 12 hour period."
[COLLINS, L., 8-4-98, p. 3] In 1997
a lithium battery storage area exploded, a wall of flames 300 feet tall burned
for hours, sending thick, black smoke over the area. "No one thought,"
notes the Toronto Star, "to alert the Bedouin to the possible
peril until three hours later." [COHN, M., 10-18-98]

(In
the same vein, in 1998 Palestinian investigators discovered a secret toxic
waste dumping ground that Israeli companies had been using in Arab areas in
the Occupied Territories, including "32 hazardous materials, including
pesticides and medical waste." [COHN, M., 10-18-98] )

Meanwhile, a former deputy mayor of Jerusalem,
Meron Benvenisti, notes the ideological undercurrent of the Israeli "ecological"
military order in the Occupied Territories that prohibits local Arabs from
picking a herb called Za'atar, a wild plant they had freely gathered for centuries:

"[The order] is only a strong political
and ideological statement: You

Palestinians despoil the land indiscriminately
because you do not feel

for it, ergo it is not your homeland. We
[Jews] look after it. Therefore

it is ours." [BENVENISTI, p. 24]

**************************************

The ideological foundation for the modern
state of Israel is the political philosophy of Zionism; its fundamental assertions
were practical, secular, and activist in nature. Unlike traditional Judaism
which passively awaited God's intervention via an expected Messiah to lead
world Jewry into a messianic age of Jewish redemption, empowerment, and leadership,
Zionism declared it important that Jews take their destiny into their own
hands. "Zionism," notes Charles Silberman, "... transformed
the meaning of Jewishness messianism. Instead of waiting for God to bring
about the Messianic Age in His own way and time, as the Orthodox believed
... the Zionists insisted that the Jews had to go to work to bring about their
own redemption." [SILBERMAN, p. 39]
And the most pressing Zionist issue at hand was the desire for an explicitly
Jewish national homeland. Although in early Zionist years a temporary Jewish
homeland in parts of Argentina or Kenya or Uganda was considered, few of the
rank and file members of the movement took such suggestions seriously. The
emotional attachment, after all, unlike other European-based nationalist movements,
was based on traditional religious beliefs: the ancient homeland that God
had reputedly given to the Israelites. The homeland was not really negotiable.
It had to be a return to Zion: Israel.

Although Zionism was largely a secular movement,
the first president of modern Israel (and an immigrant from Russia), Chaim
Weizman, notes the attraction of what was then "Palestine," quite
clearly:

"[Arthur James Balfour] asked me why some Jews, Zionists, were so bitterly
opposed to the Uganda offer. The British Government was really anxious to
do do something to relieve the misery of the Jews; and the problem was a practical
one, calling for a practical approach. In reply I plunged into what I recall
as a long harangue on the meaning of the Zionist movement. I dwelt on the
spiritual side of Zionism, I pointed out that nothing but a deep religious
conviction expressed in modern political terms could keep the movement alive,
and that this conviction had to be based on Palestine and on Palestine alone.
Any deflection from Palestine was -- well, a form of idolatry. I added that
if Moses had come into the sixth Zionist Congress when it was adopting the
resolution in favour of the Commisssion for Uganda, he would surely have broken
the tablets once again. We knew that the Uganda offer was well-meant, and
on the surface of it might appear the more practical road. But I was sure
that -- quite apart from the availability and suitability of the territory
-- the Jewish people would never produce either the money or the energy required
in order to build up a wasteland and make it habitable, unless that land was
Palestine. Palestine had this magic and romantic appeal for the Jews; our
history has been what it is because of our tenacious hold on Palestine. We
have never accepted defeat and have never forsaken the memory of Palestine.
Such a tradition could be converted into real political power." [WEIZMAN, C., 1949, p. 143]

"Even those who rebelled against
religion," notes Ehud Luz, "could not ignore the need to deal with
it, for the simple reason that Jewish nationalism drew its legitimacy from
the Jewish religion: Zionism was rooted in the Jewish past, and no one denied
that this past had a religious character." [LUZ, p. x]
"The mythos-driven craving for the ancestral land," suggests
Israeli Jay Gonen, "is tied to deep unconscious layers in the Jewish
psyche." [GONEN, J., p. 200]

Sometimes these "cravings" are
not so unconscious. The underlying links between the religion of Judaism and
secular Zionism is so great that Henrietta Szold, the founder of Hadassah
(the international Zionist women's organization), was the first woman to study
at the Jewish Theological Seminary. [HESCHEL, 1983, p. xiv]

Part of the Zionist revival included reclaiming
the nearly dead language of Hebrew (which had been reduced over the centuries
to use only for religious purposes). Intended to be applied to a new, secularized
Zionist society, as early as 1926 scholar Gershom Scholem noted the latent
undercurrents in attempting to secularly appropriate a religiously-charged
language: "The Land [of Israel] is a volcano. It provides lodging for
the language [of Hebrew] ... What will be the result of the updating of Hebrew?
Will the abyss of the holy tongue which we have implanted in our children
not yawn wide? People here do not realize what they are doing. They think
they have made Hebrew into a secular language, that they removed its apocalyptic
sting. But that is not so ... Every word which is not simply made up but rather
taken from the treasure house of well-worn terms is laden with explosives."
[RAVITZKY, A., p. 3]

"Although in rabbinic times an Aramaic
translation of the Torah was declaimed alongside the biblical text in public
readings ...," notes Barry Holtz,
"it
was the Hebrew original that was venerated and preserved. This sense of the
sacred quality of the language begins with the Bible itself. God speaks, and
through language the world comes into being. Jews, at least since rabbinic
times, have taken the holiness of the language with great seriousness."
[HOLTZ, B., 1984, p. 21]

"There is no Sabbath Judaism without
Zionism," notes Dagobert Runes, "Every daily prayer of the observing
Jew carries the undertone of return to Zion. The four great holidays of the
Jewish faith are imbedded in Zionist land and Zionist homecoming. Judaism
is a little possible without Zionism as Christianity without Christ."
[MARX, K., 1959, p. x] "Herein lies the ambiguity of Zionism," says
Jacob Neusner,

"It was supposedly a secular movement,
yet in reinterpreting the

classic mythic structures of Judaism, it
compromised its secularity

and exposed its fundamental unity with
the classic mythic being of

Judaism ... What has happened in Zionism
is that the old has been

in one instant destroyed and resurrected.
The 'holy people' are no

more, the nation-people take their place.
How much has changed

in the religious tradition, when the allegedly
secular successor-

continuator has preserved not only the
essential perspective of the

tradition, but done so pretty much in the
tradition's own symbols

and language?" [NEUSNER, J., 1972,
p. 100]

"The fact," notes Alan Dowty,
"that many early Zionists sought to 'divorce' themselves from Jewish
history does not, however, mean that they always succeeded in disentangling
themselves from its grip. In fact, the illusion that Zionism could escape
the legacies -- negative and positive -- of the Jewish past, through an exercise
of sheer ideological will, may have been the greatest conceit among the necessary
self-deceptions of the founding fathers ... Holidays and national symbols
were also inevitably drawn from the past, even if attempts were made to alter
their content and significance. The very legitimacy of the entire [Zionist]
enterprise also rested, in the end, on Jewish history and religion, a factor
that grew in importance as conflict with the Arab population developed."
[DOWTY, 1998]

Monford Harris sees a strong Judaism-Zionism
link in the old religious covenant notion:

"The dynamic of Zionism ... is only possible
on the basis of covenental solidarity.
... None of the universal categories -- race,
nation, nationality, or religion -- can
account for this involvement. It is accountable
only on the basis of covenental
solidarity throughout Jewish history. While
twentieth century Jewry no longer uses
convenental terms and has lost its conscious
awareness of its self-understanding,

it does, nevertheless, opeate with the ideas
of the Covenant." [HARRIS, M., 1965,
p. 92]

Early Zionism in Israel also stressed a
"back to the land" ethic, emphatically distancing the new Jewish
people from their traditional "Shylock" economic middleman roles
in Europe for honest labor in the farm fields of Palestine. Community-owned
socialist agricultural enterprises called
kibbutzim
sprouted up everywhere and were heralded as the foundation for a new, proud,
hard-working Jewish identity. By 1986, however, Etan Levine noted that "today's
kibbutz member is profoundly disturbed by the failure to transmit its values
to the young ... To many an Israeli, today's kibbutz is seen as sort of a
country club, using hired labor for the Arab and Sephardic towns, and exploiting
the kibbutz's favorable tax status and its undue influence in the Israeli
Knesset." [LEVINE, E., p. 46]

Rudiments of the Zionist world view began
to take hold among a few Jewish thinkers in the mid-1800s. Moses Hess wrote
Rome and Jerusalem in 1862, a work generally credited to be the origin
of Zionist theory, although the term would not be invented, nor the ideas
distilled, till decades later. "Hess," wrote later Zionist philosopher
Martin Buber, "was no 'precursor' of the Zionist movement. He was its
initiation." "Everything we have attempted," said preeminent
Zionist activist Theodore Herzl, "can be found in this [Rome andJerusalem] work." [HESS, opening page]

"The pious Jew is before all else a
Jewish patriot," wrote Hess in this seminal work of Jewish secular nationalism,
"the 'new-fangled' Jew who denies Jewish nationalism is not only an apostate,
a renegade in the religious sense, but a traitor to his people and to his
family. Should it prove true that the emancipation of the Jews is incompatible
with Jewish nationalism, then the Jew must sacrifice emancipation ... The
Jewish religion is primarily Jewish patriotism. This the Jewish 'Reformers'
who 'emancipated' themselves from the Jewish nation knew quite well. They
are wary of expressing their true sentiments frankly." [HESS, p. 27-28]
In an earlier work, entitled Money
(1845), Hess had located the worldwide Jewish community in a socio-economic
Darwinian sense far from their collective self-perception as humankind's consummate
victims: "The Jews, who in the natural history of the social animal would
have had the world-historical mission to elicit the predator in humanity,
have now accomplished the task." [REINHARZ, p. 85] (The turn of the century socialist/Zionist
Ber Borochov echoed this perspective of non-Jews, noting that non-Jews tended
to gain "their livelihood from nature," and that "it is obvious
that Jews, in contradistinction to all other nations, derive their livelihood
exclusively from man." [BOROCHOV, p. 62]
Hess also, like so many in the Jewish political world in our own day,
abandoned "universalist" political activism for Jewish "particularism."
Hess was for years a communist theorist, even writing in 1847 "a draft
for a communist manifesto." [GIDAL, p. 223]

A second Zionist theorist of considerable
import was Leon Pinsker whose treatise Auto-Emancipation appeared in
1882. "We have not ceased even in the lands of our exile to be spiritually
a distinct nation," he wrote, "but this spiritual nationality, so
far from giving us the status of nation in the eyes of other nations, is the
very cause of their hatred for us as a people." [SACHAR, p. 300] Traditional religious belief that Gentile hostility
to Jews was a punishment from God was secularly adjusted in Pinsker's argument;
he proclaimed what in our day has become Jewish canon: Jewish irresponsibility
for their roles in history and the declared irrational essence of a corresponding
"Jew-hatred." Pinsker, says Walter Laqueur, "regarded Judaeophobia
as a psychic aberration, but in his view it was hereditary. Transmitted as
a disease for two thousand years, it was incurable ... Prejudice, subconscious
notions, could not be removed by reasoning, however forceful and clear."
[LAQUEUR, p. 71] "One of the
fundamentals of Zionism," confirmed Zionist heroine Hannah Senesh in
later years, "is the realization that anti-Semitism is an illness which
can neither be fought against with words, nor cured with superficial treatment."
[UMANSKY/ASHTON, p. 175]

The most famous Zionist, however, was Theodore
Herzl, a journalist (he was a correspondent for Vienna's Neue Freie Presse,
the most influential newspaper in the Hapsburg Empire), and playwright, who
struggled as a dreamer and activist towards resolvement of "the Jewish
problem" in Europe. Herzl's novel
Altneuland has been described as "the foundation document of the
modern state of Israel." [SELZER, p. 42] "Herzl," says Michael Selzer, "endorses
as valid the negative image of the Jew with which he had earlier condemned
and then catered most extravagantly to [for funds], [the book was the] creation
of a fantasy state in which the self-hating Jewish readers of the book could
find and identify themselves with their complete antithesis." [SELZER,
p. 42] Herzl's idea of Israel, says
Amnon Rubenstein, was "a mini-Switzerland in the heart of the Middle
East." [RUBENSTEIN, A., p. 11]

As late as 1893, he seriously entertained
the idea that the problem to anti-Semitism could be resolved by a mass conversion
of all Jewish children to Christianity. [AVISHAI, p. 37] The publication of Herzl's ideas about the
creation of a Jewish homeland, The Jewish State, and mass Jewish exodus
to it, became the most influential work in Zionist history.

Jacques Kornberg notes Herzl's essential
world view, so deeply rooted in the Jewish
martyrological and persecution tradition: "Herzl's litany of Jewish suffering
was wildly exaggerated, for he claimed that Jews were 'always the carefully
looked after and cultivated leeches or the ... chamber serfs ... of the powerful.'
In Herzl's view of Jewish history there were no periods of security or normality.
Later this view was to become part of his Zionist conception of the Jewish
dispersion as a 2,000 year period of captivity and unfreedom." [KORNBERG,
p. 84]

And as World Zionist Organization president
Nahum Goldmann once wrote:

"[Theodore Herzl] put [the Zionist
issue] in a famous and totally

misleading saying: 'The problem of Zionism
is one of means of transport:

there is a people without a land, and a
land without a people' ... He

utter[ed] a double falsehood: first, Palestine
was not a country without

people, since there were hundreds of thousands
of Arabs living there;

and second, the Jews were not a landless
people, for the assimilated

Jews were good Frenchmen, Germans, Englishmen and so on."

[GOLDMANN, N., 1978, p. 88]

Eventually Herzl and his cohorts were visiting
powerful people throughout the world, lobbying the Zionist ideas intensely,
seeking both funds from the wealthy and political favors. Among those from
whom he sought help -- particularly in concessions for Jewish immigration
to Palestine -- in his single-minded focus on Jews was the Sultan of Turkey.
"When Herzl," notes Hannah Arendt, "during these negotiations
received cables from students of various oppressed nationalities protesting
against agreements with a government which had just slaughtered hundreds of
thousands of Armenians, he only observed: 'This will be useful for me with
the Sultan.'" [ARENDT, in SELZER, p. 236]

Alfred Lilienthal notes the curious similarity
of traditional Zionism and anti-Semitic ideology regarding the Jewish inability--
or resistance -- to assimilate into
non-Jewish societies. Seminal Zionist writings, like those of Hess, Herzl
and Pinsker, says Lilienthal, argued that "Jews formed in the midst of
the nations, among which they reside, a distinctive element which cannot be
readily digested in any country. (Strangely, these were practically the same
words for which the [anti-Semitic]
Dearborn Independent and Henry Ford, Sr. were to be sued more than sixty years
later by American Jews of Zionist leanings)." [LILIENTHAL, p. 13]

This classical anti-Semitic accusation
-- that Jews live within a host society, but are not truly a fully dedicated
part of it -- is actually a fundamental belief too of the Zionist credo. An
essential principle of Zionism is the secular revamping of the old religious
notion of Jewish identity throughout the world:
galut -- exile. As noted earlier, the idea of
galut asserts that Jews -- dispersed from ancient Israel throughout
the world -- are everywhere in places they do not belong. Their own true home
can only be Israel. Zionism holds
that, because Jews are scattered throughout the world in other peoples' lands,
Jews are ethically, spiritually, morally, and physically impaired from their
true natures. In Hebrew, one of the meanings of
galut
is "sighing under the yoke of oppression." [GOLDSTEIN, p. 178]
In the Zionist view, Jews are not --and cannot be -- connected to the lands,
culture, and peoples of their Diaspora (dispersion). "The Zionist critique
of assimilation," notes Donald Niewyk, "... rested on a certain
conviction that all efforts to blend with non-Jews must lead unswervingly
to deformed Jewish lives. The new discipline of psychoanalysis was mustered
to demonstrate the neurotic side effects of divided consciousness. Rootlessness
and inferiority complexes were shown to generate everything from revolutionary
activity to Jewish anti-Semitism, extreme German nationalism, and suicide."
[NIEWYK, p. 126]

Only gathered together in their own nation
can Jews of the world attain "normalization." Once the Jewish people had "normalized,"
hoped Theodore Herzl, the Zionist "father" of modern Israel, "it
is the anti-Semite who will be our staunchest friends, and the anti-Semitic
countries which will be our allies." [FEUERLICHT, p. 222] In modern Israel
the term galut is a slur. "Galut
has become a general term of contempt," says Charles Liebman and Steven
Cohen, "bearing no relation to where one lives." [LIEBMAN/COHEN]

"In classical Zionist thinking,"
says Liebman and Cohen, "the non-Jews are not to be blamed for their
hostility to the Jews. The fault lies in the unnatural condition of Jews living
as strangers in a host society that understandably harbors suspicions of them
and their intentions." [LIEBMAN/SILBERMAN, p. 58] Even David Ben-Gurion,
revered by many Jews as a pioneer Zionist and the first prime minister of
the modern state of Israel (to 1963), said that

"The cause of our troubles and the
anti-Semitism of which we complain

result from our peculiar status that does
not accord with the established

framework of the nations of the world.
It is not the result of the

wickedness or folly of the Gentiles which we call anti-Semitism."

[LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 58]

From a Zionist racial perspective, notes
Donald Niewyk, "even a moderate Zionist such as Gustav Krojanker could
describe anti-Semitism as the ideological superstructure of 'instinctive animal
peculiarities' that were natural among groups 'divided by blood and history.'"
[NIEWYK, p. 127-128]

For decades, the Zionist movement basically
agreed with the standard anti-Semitic criticisms of the Jews of Europe, that
Jews were exploitive, often unethical, elitist separatists in their self-perceived
"host nations," and they were entrenched in the centers of commerce,
overly fixated upon the accumulation of money. "The Zionist position," says Aleksander
Hertz, "was ... similar to that of the anti-Semite. Both spoke of the
organic separateness of the Jews and their alienness. Although they differed
fundamentally in their evaluations of the role of the Jews and their historic
significance, their intellectual premises were the same, and they did not
differ greatly in their conclusions." [HERTZ] "Intriguingly,"
notes Bernard Avishai, "political Zionists often accepted as true some
of the anti-Semite's most outrageous stereotypes of the Jew ... Accordingly,
political Zionists were often unable to articulate precisely what Jewish principles
were to be defended -- apart from the assertion that the Jewish people should
survive." [AVISHAI, p. 25]

In pre-World War II Nazi Germany, Zionist
assertions that Jews were an inassimilable people mirrored, and reinforced,
the Nazis' own arguments. Both groups asserted that there should be no Jews
in Germany. "The anti-Semitic barrage continued weekly with Zionist aspersions
sounding painfully similar to the Nazi line discrediting the German citizenship
of the Jews," notes Edwin Black, "It became that much harder for
German Jews to defend against Nazi accusations of illegitimate citizenship
when a land and visible group of their own [Zionists] continually published
identical indictments ... Zionism had become a tool for anti-Semites."
[BLACK, E., p. 173]

On June 21, 1933, the German Zionist Federation
sent their evaluation of the Jewish presence in Germany to Hitler, saying:

The Israeli scholar Yehezkel Kaufman, who
represents the revisionist history so popular among Jews today that deems
anti-Semitism to be completely irrational in origin, noted that in Zionism's
early decades of development

"Zionist ideology itself was by no
means free from the influence of

anti-Semitism, and Zionism actually based
the national movement

on a rationale of charges that it took
over from the anti-Semites, and

attempted to find a core of justice in
the hatred of the Jews. Jews of

the Galut, the countries of dispersion,
really deserve to be hated: their

customs, tendencies, businesses, attitude
to the their environment, etc.

are the same source of the hatred, the
justifiable hatred. Therefore,

they must leave Galut." [KAUFMAN,
p. 2451]

"Our function now [as Jews],"
wrote Joseph Brenner, an important early twentieth century Zionist, "is
to recognize and admit our meanness since the beginning of history to the
present day, all the faults in our character, and then to rise and start over
again." [SILBERMAN, p. 39] "With
a burning and passionate pleasure," he wrote elsewhere, "I would
blot out from the prayer book of the Jews of our day 'Thou hast chosen us'
in every shape and form." [DOWTY, 1998, p. 1] "The old Jew in Zionist iconography,"
notes Haim Breseeth, "was not dissimilar to the standard anti-Semitic
portrait -- the 'inversion of what is productive,' 'the rootless, cosmopolitan,
unproductive, and passive entity, inevitably attracting the hatred of its
social environment, as it were. Zionism was to eradicate this type of Jewishness
and replace it with the new Jew." [BRESEETH, p. 194]

"The vocabulary of abuse [from Zionists
about the Jewish people of Europe] in Hebrew literature," notes Yehezkel
Kaufman, "--where Jews speak to one another without fear of exaggeration
-- is of a sort you would find only in anti-Semitic literature of the worst
type .... Frishman: 'Jewish life is a 'dog's' life that 'evokes disgust.'
Berdichevski: 'Not a nation, not a people, not human.' Brenner: 'Gypsies,
filthy dogs, inhuman, wounded dogs.' A. D. Gordon: 'Parasitism, people fundamentally
useless.' From the articles of Shwardron: 'Slaves, helots, the basest uncleanliness,
worms, filth, parasitic rootlessness.' (See his writings in Moznaim, 1933,
nos. 33-38). In honor of the anniversary of Histadrut [the national Israeli
labor federation], Davar, the Palestinian [i.e., now Israel] newspaper,
printed a vowel-pointed headline: 'National resistance, the regeneration of
a parasitic nation.' " [KAUFMAN, p. 241]

As Joachim Doron notes, "the Jewish
self-criticism so widespread among the German Zionist intelligentsia often
seemed dangerously similar to the plaints of the German anti-Semites."
[FINKELSTEIN, N., 1998, p. 24]

Shaul Avigur, the head of the organization
which aided illegal immigration to Israel against British Mandate curtailment,
had great disdain for the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust who made it to
Israel. Avigur remarked that

"They are different ... completely
different [from other Jews in Israel].

The propensity to inform is widespread
among them ... in commerce

they engage in everything possible; the
children buy and sell dollars;

"The [European] ghetto Jew was doomed
from the Zionist perspective," says Haim Breseeth, "-- human dust,
as [former Israeli president] Weitzmann named him, a historical figure with
a despicable past and no future. Thus, the ghetto Jew became the antithesis
of the Israeli Jew, even before the creation of the Israeli state. This is
very different from how every other Jewish community, notably the buoyant
American Jewish community, has perceived the European Jews." [BRESEETH,
p. 194]

"It is a sad opinion one hears many
people expressing," complained Yehezkel Kaufman in 1949, "-- that
anti-Semitism is in a certain sense an anteroom to Zionism. Many Zionists,
and not only Western European Zionists, believe with complete naivety that
to be 'good Zionists,' we must first become 'good' anti-Semites, we must first
hate ourselves... [KAUFMAN, p. 244] ...If
you were to open the notebook of a Hebrew school student [in Israel] you might
read such phrases as these: 'The Jews in the Diaspora are living unhealthy
lives, as unsavory tradesmen, and sometimes have unsavory private lives too
... They are corrupt ... The Gentiles around them are living healthy lives,'
or: 'The Jews in the Galut prefer storekeeping, banking, and peddling' and
that is why the Gentiles hate them; 'the lack of Jewish farmers and Jewish
workers has been the reason for their unnatural lives, and has aroused hatred."
[KAUFMAN, p. 244]

"[Theodore Herzl, the official founder
of the modern state of Israel] did not claim that the charges of the anti-Semite
were altogether unjust," observed Walter Laqueur, "The ghetto, which
had not been of their making, had bred [in Jews] certain asocial qualities:
the Jews had come to embody the characteristics of men who had served long
prison terms." [LAQUEUR, p. 88] Likewise, Zionist writer Theodore Lessing, says Daniel Niewyk,
believed that European Jewry's "preoccupation with security and
material wealth had brought them a half-deserved reputation as exploiters."
[NIEWYK, p. 137]

"Reading today -- in the post-Holocaust
era -- the writings of the founders of Zionism," says Amnon Rubenstein,
"one is slightly embarrassed by the abuse against the very nature of
the Jewish communities in exile, in galut ... [But] Zionism did not usher
in this mood. Nineteenth century Hebrew and Yiddish literature ... vilify
the Jewish existence within the traditional Pale of Settlement, the 'parasitical'
occupations which mar it and the sickening submission to brute force and oppression."
[RUBENSTEIN, A., p. 5]

Of course, modern Israeli propaganda needs,
and Jewish identity needs, have changed in recent years. Today the official
Zionist view, malleable to the times,
has
reabsorbed traditional Jewish thinking about a mystical, omnipresent anti-Semitism,
useful in hardening trans-world Jewish solidarity with Israel -- the Protector.
As Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen note:

"The role of anti-Semitism in formulations
of Zionism and in the

importance attributed to the existence of
the Jewish state has not

diminished. What has changed is the benign
image held by Israeli

leaders of the Gentile. It is no longer
the Jew who is indirectly

to blame for being hated. Anti-Semitism
is no longer the expected

hostility of the hosts toward their uninvited
guests. As in the

traditional Jewish past, anti-Semitism is
now attributed to the

Gentile's irrational hatred of the Jew ...
The origins of anti-Semitism

are no longer explained in terms of Jewish
estrangement from their

host societies, but as endemic to the non-Jew."
[LIEBMAN/COHEN,

p. 59]

Increasingly in recent years, the modern
state of Israel, and many Jewish apologists throughout the world, publicly
espouse views about themselves and Israel that are implicitly irreconcilable.
The widespread Jewish illusion of harmonizing completely contradictory worldviews
(universalism and particularism) is likewise echoed in the ideology of Zionism
(although some important Zionist strands have been disbanding not only allegiance
to universality, but to democracy as a social principle). As the first Prime
Minister of Israel, David Ben Gurion, (in this realm yet again a claim of
Jewish "uniqueness") put it:

"Two basic aspirations underlie all
our work in this country: to be like all

nations, and to be different from all
nations." [ARONOFF, Myths, p.

178]

Another example of Israel's implicitly contradictory
nature, notes Rachelle Saidel, is that the eventual "linking [of] the
creation of the Jewish state to the murder of six million Jews causes this
state to be born with a built-in paranoia. This 'birth defect' has led Israel
to beg for normalcy -- to be treated as all other nations, while at the same
time pointing out how -- because of the Holocaust, it should be treated differently."
[SAIDEL, p. 17]

The clumsily veiled chauvinism at root here
is, as always, the classical religiously-based Jewish notion of the necessity
for Jews to be "a people apart," "unique," distinct from
all others. ["Lo, the people shall dwell alone and shall not be reckoned
among the nations." --NUMBERS 23:9] For some Israelis, notes Myron Aronoff,
the biblical admonition that Israel "is a people that shall dwell alone
and shall never be reckoned among the nations, [is] a curse. However, others
consider it an affirmation of Israel's chosenness." [ARONOFF, p. 178]

Jews are the majority, ruling another nation
[Arabs], interacting on an

equal basis with the [other] goyim, assume
a sinister, domineering

significance.
Ahavat Israel, the love of Israel, the deep sense of

affinity and of common destiny, the belief
in col Israel haverim (all

Israel are comrades) which sustained the
diaspora Jews and gave

them a measure of security, resulted in
xenophobia -- being increasingly

perceived as synonymous with
sin'at hagoy (hate for the goyim)."

[Benvenisti, p. 76]

*****************************

In 1882 there were only 24,000 Jews in what
was then called Palestine, an area under control of the Muslim Ottoman Empire
of Turkey since 1516 (Great Britain took over control of Palestine in 1918).
The first Zionist Congress was held in Switzerland in 1887 and by the late
1890s Theodore Herzl had seized prominent stage in the new Zionist movement,
visiting wealthy Jewish philanthropists and even the Sultan of Turkey in the
hopes of creating a Jewish state in the Holy Land. To acquire Palestine, said
Herzl, "we require diplomatic negotiations ... and propaganda on a large
scale." [LAQUEUR, p. 95] In the
case of the Turkish ruler, Walter Laqueur observes that Herzl "was ready
to use his influence [at the most important newspaper in central Europe, the
Neue Freie Presse] to play down the anti-Armenian persecutions."
[LAQUEUR, p. 118]

Most early Jews in Palestine were religiously-oriented.
With increased interest (mainly by Jews in Eastern Europe) in Jewish nationalism,
and the growing Horevei Zion (Lovers of Zion) movement, activist Jews of a more secular
nature began to make their way to Palestine in the later 1880s. Between 1881
and 1904 (in what is called the First Aliya -- ascension -- in Zionist circles)
30,000 Jews emigrated to Palestine. Still,
by 1918 and World War I, the (now) 56,000 Jews in Palestine were still tiny
compared to the 640,000 Arabs around them. [SHAPIRA, p. 22-23]

Although Zionism was conceived as a Jewish
"back to the land" movement, "by 1910," notes Walter Laqueur,
"the [Zionist] settlers were owners of plantations employing mainly Arab
workers. Their own children were sent to education in France." [LAQUEUR,
p. 79] "The major reason that
Zionism survived its struggling early period before 1917," says Norman
Cantor, "was that it received the endorsement and patronage of many [Jewish]
billionaire patriarchs and their charitable organizations right from the start
of the modern Zionist ventures in the 1880s." [CANTOR, p. 298]
Of particular importance in this regard in the early Zionist years
was Baron Edmond de Rothschild, one of the heirs to the fabulous Rothschild
European banking dynasty.

Chaim Weizman, the first president of modern
Israel, and an immigrant from Russia, describes how the future Jewish state
was colonized by European Jews in its early years:

"Jews settled in Palestine, and they were not expelled. They bought land,
sometimes through straw men, sometimes by bribes, for Turkish officialdom
was even more corrupt than the Russian. Houses were built in evasion of the
law. Between baksheesh [bribes] and an infinite variety of subterfuges, the
first little colonies were created."

[WEIZMAN, C., 1949,
p. 41]

Jews continued to make their way to Palestine,
in repeated waves. There were second (1904-1914), third (1919-1923), fourth
(1924-1928), and fifth aliyahs (1929-1939).
After the founding of the Israeli state in 1948, the next ten years witnessed
another 900,000 Jews moving to live in the Holy Land. In 1950 over 100,000
Jews emigrated to Israel from Iraq. "They were driven out of Iraq to
Israel," notes Amnon Rubenstein, "motivated by numerous anti-Jewish
attacks. At the time, however, it was widely assumed these attacks were perpetrated
by hostile Iraqis, but recent scholarship indicates the actions were undertaken
by overly zealous Zionists who wanted to create an atmosphere of fear that
would convince the Iraqis to move to Israel." [RUBENSTEIN, A., p. 60]

The Jewish National Fund was created in
1901, in large part to purchase land. Another international Jewish organization,
the Jewish Agency, was founded in 1929 to encourage Jewish immigration, raise
funds for settlement, and address administration of the new Jewish communities.
By 1980, the Jewish National Fund alone had spent $15 billion on the Jews
of Israel; per its charters, none of it went to the Arab sector of Israeli
society. [AVISHAI, p. 320] By the 1920s, Palestinian Arabs began sometimes
violent resistance to what they saw as Jewish encroachment, fearing what their
new neighbors' ultimate intentions might be. Major acts of violence continued
to increase between Arabs and Zionists. In 1929, in rioting over control of
the Jerusalem Wailing Wall, (the area with high religious significance to
both to Jews and Muslims), 38 Arabs and 29 Jews were killed; riots spread
into the distant towns of Hebron and Safed. A total of 120 Jews and 87 Arabs
were reported killed in the fighting. By 1939 20,000 British troops had largely
subdued Arab revolt against Zionist incursion.

"Hundreds of Arab villages" were
destroyed by Jews by the end of 1949. "Traditional Israeli history,"
says Amnon Rubenstein, "has presented the Palestinian exodus as the responsibility
of Arab leaders who ordered the Palestinians to flee, promising that they
could soon return to their homes as conquering heroes. Israeli leaders encouraged
them to stay in their homes and villages. Recent research by a number of historians
and political scientists, including Israeli scholar and journalist Benny Morris,
reveals that this is a myth on several grounds." [RUBENSTEIN, A., p.
52] Rubenstein notes that the "vast
majority of Palestinians" were expelled or driven out by terrorist campaigns
against them, including those by varied Israeli forces: the Haganah, the Israel
Defense Force, Irgun and LEHI. There was even a military plan -- Plan Dalet
-- to empty Arab villages for later Jewish settlement. [RUBENSTEIN, A. p.
53] "Those expelled," says
Rubenstein, "were allowed to take with them only what they could carry;
many had their valuables stolen by Israeli soldiers as they passed military
checkpoints." [RUBENSTEIN, A., p. 53]

With heavy fighting between Jews and Arabs
in 1948, most of the 175,000 Arabs who remained in the area that officially
became part of the new nation of Israel that year were peasants in interior
regions that the warring little reached. These people and their descendants
are today resident/citizens of the Jewish state of Israel, an underclass to
be sure, but distinct from the Arabs in what is generally known as the Occupied
Territories: Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights. Bernard Avishai notes
the modern day status of the Israeli Arabs: "About half of Israel's Arabs still live in nearly
isolated towns and serve as a work force for Israeli Jewish industries. A
quarter work on Jewish farms and construction sites. These figures convincingly
show that the Israeli Arabs are dependent upon and dominated by the Jewish
economy, that Arabs have become a segregated industrial proletariat in Israel."
[AVISHAI, B., p. 315]

Tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees
flooded into the Gaza area, an area 4-8 miles wide and 28 miles long, bordered
by Israel, Egypt, and the Mediterranean sea. In 1967 the 350,000 Palestinians
crammed into this small space marked it as the highest population density
on earth. (AVISHAI, B., p. 274] With complete Israeli control of the area
in all facets of economic, social, and political life, by 1973 a third of
Gaza's laborers were forced to work in low-paying, benefit-less jobs for Jewish
employers. With few rights and no hope in an entire area that resembled a
prison, Israeli Army Chief of Staff Raphael Eitan once called the Palestinians
trapped within Israeli rule in the Occupied Territories "drugged cockroaches
in a bottle." [JANSEN, M., p. 15]

By 1991 55% of the land mass of the West
Bank and 30% of Gaza Strip was even controlled by the Jewish National Fund.
This means, notes Amnon Rubenstein, "that increasing numbers of Palestinians
are forced into ever-smaller amounts of territory and in many cases are denied
their means of livelihood." [RUBENSTEIN, A., p. 91] Israeli-legislated human rights violations
in the Occupied Territories has included, for decades, the "shooting
and beating of unarmed individuals," "expulsion from regions without
cause," "suppression of Palestinian culture" (the word Palestine,
the displaying of the Palestinian flag, wearing its colors, etc. have all
been punishable crimes during Israeli rule), "collective punishment of
entire neighborhoods," "military censorship of all publications,"
"confiscation of land and water resources," and "restriction
of economic activities." [RUBENSTEIN, A., p. 95]

In 1981 an Israeli-created administration
system in the West Bank removed elected mayors it disliked and replaced them
with Jewish overseers in the Arab towns of Nablus, Ramallah, and El-Bireh.
[AVISHAI, p. 292] "The West Bank
is ruled under British emergency regulations from 1946," notes Bernard
Avishai, "which one former Israeli Justice Minister, Yaacov Shimon Shapiro,
has called Fascist; Amnesty International reported that, from January to June
1979 alone, some 1500 youths were taken into custody. Tens of thousands more
were interrogated, or intimidated during the period of the general strike
in the spring of 1982." [AVISHAI, B., p. 307]

The opportunity to nakedly exploit the subjugated
Arab population has not been overlooked by Jewish rulers. "Israeli investors
and contractors, meanwhile," says Avishai, "have not failed to profit
from the situation [in the Occupied Territories], [Israeli scholar] Benvenisti
points out that hundreds of private speculators and builders have made fortunes
here." [AVISHAI, B., p. 308]

For a small minority of Israelis, such
conditions forced upon another people has elicited serious soul-searching.
"A prolonged squabble [in this case, with Arabs] does not ennoble,"
noted prominent Israeli novelist Amos Oz, "it degrades. In our case it
is pushing us back into our 'hereditary' depression, into the neuroses, the
atavistic tribal madness from which we were trying to escape, back into megalomania,
the paranoia, the traditional nightmare." [OZ, A., p. 194]
"The social tensions entailed by occupation," says another
Israeli, Bernard Avishai, "would have taken their toll on any democracy,
but they have had a peculiar and unfortunate impact on Israel -- inasmuch
as Israeli democracy was improvised in 1948 and has subsequently been made
to coexist with a number of residual, genuinely Zionist institutions which
had always excluded non-Jews [AVISHAI, p. 299] ... Since the occupation is
run entirely according to military law, Israeli soldiers, many of whom are
civilian reservists, have not been subject to normal civilian penalties for
the crimes they commit in uniform ... In two notorious cases, [Chief of Staff
General Eitan] pardoned murderers. Nor are civil prosecutors able to appeal
such decisions, and there are no civil rights by means of which an Arab victim's
family might seek redress." [AVISHAI, B., p. 310]

There was also the 1990 case of Rabbi Moshe
Levinger, which epitomized an entire genre of Israeli legal lenience for Jewish
violence against Arabs. "Levinger," noted the Toronto Star,

Palestinians since the start of the Palestinian
uprising, only four cases

went to court, said Naam Yashuvi, information
director for B'Tselem,

a prominent Israeli human rights group.
Two resulted in jail terms: the

Levinger case, and that of Israel Zeev,
who in December, 1988, got

three years in jail and two more suspended
for killing a shepherd."

[BARTHOS, G., 1990, p. A2]

In overview, observed Glenn Frankel, "A
country that enforced a permanent military occupation in the West Bank and
Gaza that denied its Palestinian subjects even the most rudimentary rights
of free speech and the vote, and that locked up, abused and expelled Palestinians
without formal charges or trial could not claim to wholeheartedly share liberal
American values." [FRANKEL, G., p. 224]

In response to Jewish dominance in the
Holy Land, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was founded in 1964
to violently resist the Jewish state of Israel; it also eventually warred
with Arab splinter groups like Fateh and the Popular Front for the Liberation
of Palestine.

With the expulsion of large numbers of Arabs
in Israel's "War of Independence" from self-declared Jewish lands,
and with the impossibility of these refugees returning, the new Israeli government
declared, in 1950, the Law for the Acquisition of Absent Property. Anyone
absent from their property between November 1, 1947 and September 1 1948,
and not residing in Jewish-controlled areas, was declared to have abandoned
ownership and the property was confiscated by the Jewish state. This process
also had the effect of robbing many Arab citizens within Jewish boundaries
(who didn't even know about the new law, or were unable to challenge it) from
their lands. As Amnon Rubenstein explains, "once property was declared
absentee property, this status would remain in force, even if it could later
be proved that the property had been incorrectly classified." [RUBENSTEIN,
A., p. 62] Another device to rob Arabs
of their land was through the Emergency Article for the Exploitation of Uncultivated
Areas. Land that had not been cultivated in the past three years was also
confiscated by the state, often by declaring "an area farmed by Palestinians
a closed military zone so that no Palestinian was allowed to enter it. After
the three-year period had elapsed, the land could then be declared uncultivated"
and seized. [RUBENSTEIN, A., p. 63] Some Palestinian land officially under Ottoman
Empire or British Mandate registration was also confiscated by the new Jewish
state.

Despite condemnation by the international
community, Israel formally annexed East Jerusalem in 1967 and the Golan Heights
(bordering Syria) in 1981.

******************************

In its formative years, Zionism was actually
overwhelmingly rejected by most of the world's Jews. In Europe, in the nineteenth century, one of
the most influential leaders of the Reform Judaism movement, Abraham Geiger,
attacked Moses Hess as someone who "after bankruptcy as a socialist and
all kinds of swindles wants to make a hit with [Jewish] nationalism."
[LAQUEUR, p. 53] In 1919 "French
leader" Sylvain Levi "spoke violently against the restoration of
a Jewish home in Palestine." [LITVINOFF, B., p. 114] Subscription to
Zionism was feared to open Jews everywhere to charges of national disloyalty
in the countries they lived. "Except for a few scattered voices,"
says Aharon Feldman, "Jewish leadership as a whole saw Herzl's Zionism
as a threat to Jewish survival. The spiritual giants of the times [the turn
of the twentieth century] -- Reb Yitzhak Elhanem, the Hafetz Haim, and Reb
Haim Brisker -- refused to enter a partnership with it." [FELDMAN, p.
23] The first Zionist World Congress was held in
Basel, Switzerland. Plans had been to hold it in Munich, Germany, but the
Jewish community there didn't want it. [RUBENSTEIN, A., p. 42]

As Jewish philosopher, Morris Raphael Cohen,
wrote in The New Republic in 1919:

"A national Jewish Palestine must necessarily
mean a state founded

on a peculiar race, a tribal religion and
a mystic belief in a peculiar

soil, when liberal America stands for separation
of Church and state,

the free mixing of races, and the fact that
men can change their

habitation and language and still advance
the process of civilization."

[ROSENFELD, A., 1997, p. 111]

Some in the ultra-Orthodox world even blamed
Zionists for the Holocaust. "As early as the second World War,"
notes Israeli scholar Aviezer Ravitzky, "harsh accusations were made
by some ultra-Orthodox radicals concerning direct Zionist responsibility for
what was happening [to Jews in Europe]: it was the Zionists' declarations
that provoked the anger of the oppressor to the point of bloodshed; it was
they who hindered the rescue effort [of European Jewry]; it was they who disturbed
the tranquility of the Jews in the lands of their dispersion." [RAVITZKY,
p. 65] While Jewish Orthodoxy rejected Zionism as "a false messianic
movement," so too did "most Jewish liberals and socialists, [who]
having accepted the faith of the Enlightenment, rejected Zionism as a reactionary
philosophy." [KOLSKY, p. 15-17]

In Britain, by the 1930s the Anglo-Jewish
Association of the Board of Deputies (which included prominent Jews like Edward
Montagu, the British Secretary of State for India) believed that Zionism was
for a Jews a "traitorous disloyalty to their native lands." [LILIENTHAL,
p. 23] Some Jews worried that the Zionist movement would fuel anti-Semitic
hostility, invariably reaffirming perceptions that Jews were, wherever they
were in the world, essentially elitist separatists, concerned only with their
own people. "Prominent Jewish communal leaders," notes Thomas Kolsky,
"like Lucien Wolf, Claude Montefiore, and Laurie Magnus denounced Zionism
as an ally of anti-Semitism." [KOLSKY, p. 17]

In Germany, prominent Jewish writer Joseph
Roth compared the parallel racial structures of Zionism and German fascism,
writing a letter to a Jewish friend in 1935:
"A Zionist is a National Socialist [i.e., German Nazi]; a Nazi
is a Zionist ... I cannot fathom how it is you wish to start the fight against
Hitler, who is merely the imbecilic brother of the Zionist, using a brother
of the National Socialist, i.e., a Zionist, even the most ingenious of them.
Perhaps you can protect Jewry in that way. But I wish to protect both Europe
and mankind from the Nazis and also
from Hitler Zionists." [SHAKED, p. 186]
"In these remarks, addressed to another assimilated Jew, Stephan
Zweig," says Gershon Shaked, reflecting a common, modern, pro-Zionist
Jewish sentiment, "pathological universalism reached its apogee."
[SHAKED, p. 186]

In America, prominent rabbi Issac Wise publicly
"denounced the whole question of a Jewish state as foreign to the spirit
of the modern Jew of this land who looks upon America as his Palestine and
whose interests are centered here." [LAQUEUR, p. 384] Prominent American financier and Jewish activist
Jacob Schiff stated that, "I cannot for one moment concede that one can
be at the same time a true American and an honest adherent to the Zionist
movement." [WHEATCROFT, 1996, p. 129] The founder and first president
of Hebrew University, and an influential American rabbi, Judah Leon Magnes,
in the 1930s also rejected the idea of a Jewish national homeland. [RUBENSTEIN,
A., p. 41] In the ongoing Zionist propaganda war, however incongruously, prominent
American Zionist activist Louis Brandeis "regularly linked the 'Zionist
cause' with the American ideal of democracy, of social justice and of liberty."
[SARNA, J., p. 57] This universalist view is commonly articulated
to defend "particularist" Zionism to this day.

In 1942 a Jewish organization was founded
by a group of Reform rabbis to oppose Zionism, the American Council for Judaism
(ACJ). "The ACJ," noted Kolsky, "condemned all forms of Jewish
separatism ... [and] denounced Zionist talk about homelessness, and opposed
granting Jews special privileges ... It rejected the creation of an exclusively
Jewish state as undemocratic and as a retreat from the universal vision of
Judaism." [KOLSKY, p. 4] As ACJ head, and life-long anti-Zionist, Elmer
Berger in later years noted one of the reasons Jews had joined ACJ: "The
racial peoplehood character of Zionism was, on an ethical and moral basis,
something to be particularly repudiated." [UROFSKY, M., 1978, p. 69]
As the mass murder of the Jews under Hitler became better known, however,
the ACJ's position lost support in the Jewish community; it was soon disbanded.
By 1946, one poll showed that 80% of American Jews supported the idea of a
Jewish state in what was then Palestine. [SPIEGEL, S., p. 18]

*******************

Zionism in its development has been varied
in ideological expression, manifest over the years in at least four principle
branches. The weakest version was
"spiritual Zionism, " or "cultural Zionism," which held
that "the Jewish people's fate was to be dispersed and their mission
was to transmit their unique spiritual genius to the societies in which they
lived." [JANSEN, p. 5] Asher HaAm (Asher Ginsberg), who moved to Palestine
in 1921, was an influential exponent of this Zionist view. Earlier, upon former
visits to the Holy Land, he wrote with concern that Jewish colonists there
"treat Arabs with hostility and cruelty, deprive them of their rights,
offend them without cause and even boast of their deeds, and nobody among
us opposes this despicable and dangerous inclination." [JANSEN, p. 6]

The most historically important version of
Zionism -- rooted in the socialist and communist origins of Eastern European
Ashkenazi Jewish pioneers in Palestine -- has been Labor Zionism. For decades
Labor was dominant in founding the socio-political principles of the modern
Jewish nation; it created the powerful Histradut trade union, the Haganah
(forerunner of today's Israeli army), Israel's largest bank, an insurance
and other companies, and it emphasized and disproportionately supported its
showpiece "back to the land" movement through communally owned socialist
enterprises known as kibbutzim.
The effects of Labor Zionism's state-dominated economy remain today. "Recently
published research," noted Norman Cantor in the mid-1990s, "sponsored
by Canada's Fraser Institute and the U.S.-based Liberty Fund, show that in
a survey of hundreds of economics professors around the world, Israel ranked
nearly last in degree of economic freedom, ahead of only several communist
countries and India." [CANTOR, p. 385]
Nonetheless, with huge infusions of American charity, the "Israeli
economy in the 1991-96 period grew faster than any other industrial economy
-- averaging over 5.2% per year -- with the lowest levels of unemployment
in the country's history." [GARFINKEL, A., p. 117]

Labor Zionism disdained the "economic
middleman" character of traditional European Jewry and celebrated physical
work and toil, particularly agricultural, and most particularly in Israel,
reconnecting with a lost identity. "The Jewish people has been completely
cut off from nature and imprisoned with city walls for 2,000 years,"
said early Zionist A. D. Gordon, "We have become accustomed to every
form of life, except to a life of labor -- of labor done at its own behest
and for its own sake ... A parasitical people is not a living people."
[CHAFETS, Z., p. 30]

At its earliest, idealistic stages some
supporters of this brand of Zionism proclaimed a familiar theme: yet another
Jewish expression -- post-Enlightenment -- to attempt to explain Jewish "uniqueness"
in terms less problematical and offensive to others, now framed as a Jewish
nation that would -- at the very least -- set emulative examples for others.
It was, in secular terms, messianic in scope. Amnon Rubenstein notes that
"the Labor [Zionist] movement endeavored to translate the Jewish terms
of uniqueness into a contemporary universal language ... It sought to go further
and place the new Israel at the helm of international society. It spoke with
messianic passion about a new millennium; a classless society, the religion
of work, the redemption of man, the communal settlement experience, the
kibbutz
and the moshav [another form
of communal agricultural settlement], the Histradut as a workers' society."
[RUBENSTEIN, A., p. 45]

Labor Zionism had been completely dominant
in Israeli political society until 1977, when the rightist Zionist strands
of Menachem Begin was voted to power. Begin's coalition party was the Likud;
his own roots were in one of the right-wing organizations called Herut, which
in turn was historically linked to the "radical right" version of
Zionism known as Revisionism, founded by Vladimir Zabotinsky. Although overshadowed
by Labor Zionism, Revisionists were not tiny. By 1931 the Revisionists claimed
21% of the delegates at the World Zionist Congress. [BELL, Terror,
p. 24] "Vladmir Zabotinksy,"
noted David Biale, charged that Jews
in the Diaspora "despised manhood, the principle of male power as understood
by all free people in history, physical courage and physical force ..., [and]
prowess of the body ... [which was] an object of ridicule." [BIALE, p.
137] "Because the Yid [Jew]
is ugly, sickly, and lacks decorum," once said Jabotinsky, "we shall
endow the ideal image of the Hebrew with masculine beauty." [RUBENSTEIN,
A., p. 4] Elsewhere, Jabotinsky asserted that "Every race possessing
a definite uniqueness seeks to become a nation, that is, to create for itself
an economic, political, and intellectual environment in which every detail
will derive from its specific thought and consequence that will also relate
to its specific taste. A specific race can establish such an environment only
in its own country, where it is master. For this reason every race seeks to
become a state." [AVISHAI, B., p.125]

"In the 1930s," says Haim Breseeth, "the Revisionists,
a typical European rightist force, were greatly influenced by Mussolini, adapting
some of the trappings of fascism: motorcades of blackshirts, a party publication
was renamed Diary of a Fascist; and some training camps were held in
fascist Italy. Immediately after the coming to power of the Nazis, fascism
became a central icon in Palestine, dividing left and right, or more accurately,
Labor Zionism, led by Ben-Gurion, from the Revisionist camp, led by Jabotinsky."
[BRESEETH, p. 194-195] "Breaking away [from the other Zionist groups]
in the 1920s," says Peter Grose, "Jabotinsky's Revisionist Zionism
organized its own fighting force in Palestine. The
Irgun
Zvai Leumi came to remind unsympathetic outsiders of Mussolini fascists;
Ben-Gurion called the Revisionist leader 'Vladimir Hitler.'" [GROSE,
p. 161] "Revisionists," notes Edwin Black,
"... were heavily fascists and profoundly influenced by Mussolini ...
True to fascist ideology, the fist and shout were the preferred methods of
achieving Revisionist goals." [BLACK, E., p. 143] Labor and Revisionist
Zionism came close to civil war when the latter group brought a shipload of
weapons into Israel. The ship was sunk by rival Zionists' artillery fire and
16 members of the IRGUN were killed. And, "ever since the mysterious
murder of the Zionist 'foreign minister' Chaim Arlosoroff in 1933," says
Jay Gonen, "allegedly by right-wing Revisionists, there had been fears
of Jewish fascism." [GONEN, p. 58]

"Jabotinsky's most cherished creation
was Betar," noted Livneh Eliezer, "[This] youth movement ... was
... a semi-militaristic entity that stressed hierarchy, discipline, obedience
to superiors, rituals, and ceremonies. Military values [were] ... a virtue,"
as was "romantic heroism." [ELIEZER, p. 26] Another small group
(founded in 1931) linked to Revisionist theory was Brit Habironim (the Covenant
of Thugs) which "was a mythological rediscovery of the glorious tales
of the [Israeli] nation, a romantic glorification of the old days of blood,
soil, heroism, and conquest." [ELIEZER, p. 25] Among the "Covenant
of Thugs" was Uri Zvi Greenberg, a popular poet well-respected in today's
Israel. Greenberg saw socialism as a "most dangerous enemy, and became
more and more convinced that a dictator was needed to lead the masses."
[LAQUEUR, p. 362]

Some in the Revisionist camp in the 1930s,
notes Jewish scholar Walter Laqueur, "expressed the view that but for
Hitler's anti-Semitism German National Socialism would have been acceptable
[to Jews] and that, anyway, Hitler had saved Germany [LAQUEUR, W., p. 33] ... Within the [Revisionist] movement there
were ... sections, some of them influential [where] ... fascist ideas had
made considerable headway and, but for the rise of Hitler and Nazism, would
no doubt have become even more prominent." [LAQUEUR, p. 382] Among Revisionist plans for Palestine (and
a larger Transjordan area) was the expelling of Arabs to Iraq. [SELZER, p.
218, 219] Revisionist policy foresaw
Jewish lands stretching from the Nile River into what is today Jordan. (In
1983, Eryk Spekter, CEO of Fame Fabrics in the U.S. and a former chairman
of Herut USA, began awarding a $100,000 "Defender of Jerusalem"
prize from his Jabotinsky Foundation at presentation dinners to people "who
had stood up for Jewish rights." Over the years, winner's of the Jabotinsky
Foundation's award included Menachem Begin, New York Times editor A.
M. Rosenthal, American Republican cabinet members Jeanne Kirkpatrick and George
Schultz, Hawaiian Senator Daniel Inouye,
and former French cabinet minister, Simone Weil among others). [NY TIMES,
12-16-98, B13]

Simha
Flapan notes that

"The Yishuv and the Jewish masses in
the Diaspora rejected most of his concepts,

but
[Jabotinsky] left an indelible mark on the Zionist attitude towards the
Arab question.
He implanted in Jewish psychology the image
of the Arab as the mortal enemy,
the idea of the inevitability of the
conflict and of the impossibility of a solution
except by sheer force. He propagated
the 'either-or' notion by which all and
every means was justified including
terror and ruthless retaliation in the
struggle for survival." [FLAPAN,
S., 1979, p. 117]

A fourth, increasingly important -- and disturbing
-- strand of Zionism has been what is often referred to as "Messianic
Zionism," or "Religious Zionism." In recent years its umbrella
political group is the National Religious Party. Its influence escalated dramatically
after 1967. With the "decline
of socialist belief" in Zionism," notes Amnon Rubenstein, "a
resurgence of religious feeling gradually emerged ... Many Israelis began
to harbor a disbelief in the power of a new Jewish nationalism to replace
traditional Jewish values." [RUBENSTEIN, A., p. 94]
Aviezer Ravitzky notes that Zionism's move towards the religious may
be inevitable: "Zionism ... seemed to [seek] to overthrow the traditional
way of life and rebelled against the imperatives of the past. Yet at the same
time it looked backwards: it employs the sacred symbols of the past and aspired
to fulfill ancient Jewish hopes." [RAVITZKY, A., p. 10]

Among Religious Zionism's most prominent
proponents was Rabbi Yitzhak Hacohen Kook, who believed that secular Zionist
success in bringing Jews to power in the Holy Land was part of the establishment
conditions that would lead to the triumphant return of the Messiah. Kook's
son, Zvi Yehudah Kook, also a rabbi who headed a religious school, notes Amos
Elon, "raised a generation of zealots, a new Jewish man ... Wrapped in
a prayer shawl and armed with a Kalashnikov; nationalistic, callously trampling
the watermelon bed of the Arabs." [JANSEN, p. 4-5] This Kook asserted
that the modern state of Israel was "fulfillment of the biblical tradition
of redemption." [RAVITZKY, A., p. 80] Elsewhere, fulfilling the worst concerns of
any anti-Semite, he proclaimed that "The state of Israel is divine ...
Not only can/must there be no retreat from a single kilometer of the Land
of Israel, God forbid, we shall conquer and liberate more and more ... We
are stronger than America, stronger than Russia ... Our position in the world,
in the world of history, in the cosmic world, is stronger and more secure
in its timelessness than theirs. There are nations that know this, and there
are nations of uncircumcised hearts that do not know it, but they shall gradually
come to know it! ... In our divine, world-encompassing undertaking, there
is no room for retreat." [RAVITZKY, A., p. 132]

Religious Zionism took especially strong
hold in Israel after the 1967 War. Jewish seizure of wider territory harkened
for some Jewish thinkers the likeliness that conditions were being created
for the return of the Messiah. Religious Zionists are particularly noticeable
in the many garrisoned Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Arab areas.
Zealous doctrine declares that the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and
Gaza must never be surrendered to Arab jurisdiction. Philip Bentley of Floral
Park, New Jersey, president of the Jewish Peace Fellowship says that

"I first time I noticed it was in
1981. I was on a post-convention tour

of Israel for rabbis and their spouses.
Our tour guide spoke of the

settlements through the Occupied Territories
on the West Bank ... He

told us that the Land will not produce
for the Arabs like it will

produce for the Jews, because this is our Land and the Land knows

its true people ... I immediately recognized
this theory for what it was --

old-fashioned blood-and-soil fascism ...
Add this to their ... elevation

of Jewish possession of the land over all
other values; their demonization

of Arabs as 'Amalek' and of Jews who support
the Peace process

as traitors or worse; and their belief
that God demands of Israel that

it expel non-Jews from the land or subjugate
them even if it means war

because Redemption depends upon it ...
It is time to promote Jewish

unity, but not at the expense once again
of ignoring the deadly cancer

that exists in Israel and among some Jews
the world over -- fascism."

[BENTLEY, P.]

Among the most influential of the Religious
Zionists is the group known as Gush
Emunim (Block of the Faithful). Founded in 1974, its physical expression
is symbolized men in knitted skullcaps carrying automatic weapons. Many are
activists in Jewish settlements in the occupied territories. And many of these
Jews are from America. "It is important to realize," notes Amnon
Rubenstein, "that [Gush Emunim's]
significance is not confined to the political area and does not lie merely
in their ability to force their will upon the country. Gush Emunim ... provides
a vociferous and occasionally theatrical voice to a wider tendency within
Israeli society ... The influence of the
Gush
-- always numerically a small fractional minority -- upon Labor [Zionism]
cannot be overestimated. They imposed their will upon successive Labor cabinets
and forced the government's hand on critical issues." [RUBENSTEIN, A.,
p. 104, 106]

By the late 1990s, noted the Jewish Monthly,
"an estimated one-third of the recruits in IDF officer-training programs
are religious Zionists." [KEINON, H., p. 31]
Concerns have been growing in some Jewish circles that such people
will listen to Orthodox rabbinical instruction over military superiors. "In
fact," says Herb Keinon, "the army faced the beginnings of such
a crisis in July 1995 when a dozen leading rabbis in the national religious
camp signed a decree stating that the Torah forbids soldiers to evacuate army
bases and then turn them over to non-Jews." [KEINON, H., p. 31]

Ironically, with secular Labor Zionism being
increasingly threatened by traditional religious-political currents, Israeli
society today roils today in a furious imploding of the traditional Jewish
Victimhood identity; confronted with a society that is predominantly other
Jews, Jewish complainers must sooner or later face an inevitable
Jewish Enemy in a Jewish-constructed society:
the Victimhood Societyitself as Oppressor. In a country where
there are principally only other Jews to accuse as neighbor-monsters, what
must be inevitably expressed is the curious spectacle of an intra-Jewish civil
war over pre-eminent Victimhood status, i.e., opposing Jewish ideological
groups asserting -- and demanding -- their respective version of the Jewish Persecution
Tradition as pre-eminent over the other. "Each community," says
Emmett Ayala, "the secular and the religious, feels that it is on the
margins of Israeli society, expressing anxieties of powerlessness in a public
culture defined by the other." [AYALA, E., p. 129]

To the degree that the Israeli government
does not act entirely by Jewish
religious law, notes Boas Evron, "to a certain extent the Orthodox communities
in Israel regard the state in which it lives as an alien 'gentile' state (and
in Israel this is accompanied by a particular hostility, for the very reason
that the state claims to be Jewish)." [EVRON, B., 1995, p. 110]

Forms of Jewish Orthodoxy and ultra-Orthodoxy
in Israel continues, often militantly, to grow. In 1988, Knesset elections
marked "a dramatic rise in the political power of the Haredi (or ultra-Orthodox)
parties." Noteworthy beneficiaries were Agudat Israel and Shas, the Sephardic
Haredi party. [FRIEDMAN, M., p. 177] "As fundamentalist-religious movements
began to acquire power elsewhere in the world," notes Menachem Friedman,
"many observers -- in Israel and abroad -- tended to view the rise in
Haredi strength as a genuine threat to liberal-secular culture." [FRIEDMAN,
M., p. 178] This growing influence
in Israel is rooted in the belief that "the Jewish people are above history,
and their political and spiritual destiny is determined directly by God, according
to their fulfillment of Halacha." [FRIEDMAN, M., p. 179]
"Orthodoxy in Israel is no longer a creed," complained Uri
Huppert in 1988, "it is a well-established clerical rabbinical hierarchy
and lay political and administrative infrastructure affecting very strongly
the most sensitive political issues ... Now, a generation after the Six Day
War, nationalistic-Zionist Orthodoxy has emerged as a 'nationalized' Talmudic-halachic
ideology of the Israeli 'Moral Majority.' This trend represents almost 50
percent of the Israeli electorate." [HUPPERT, U., 1988, p. 21]

In 1998, Ran Kislev, citing a range of Orthodox
rabbinical controls over burial practices, marriage, and other momentous personal
milestones in Israeli society, wrote that:

"Not only are the laws of [medical]
pathology adapted according to

rabbinical rulings, but also an entire
branch of surgery on transplants

is limited by them ... There are those
among us warning against the

dangers of Israel's transformation into
a halachic state. They instill in

us a fear of an ayatollah state, like
Iran. They may have missed the

boat. We are not merely en route to an ayatollah state, we are already

well in the midst of one." [KISLEV,
7-24-98]

In 2000, confronting secular Israeli society,
a news report noted that "Israel's leading orthodox rabbis [the Council
of Torah Sages] have issued a ruling banning the Internet from Jewish homes,"
declaring that it is "1,000 times more dangerous than television"
(which they banned thirty years ago) and it "threatened the survival
of the country." [PHILIPS, A., 2000, p. 18]

Increased Orthodox influence in Israeli
life also has serious ramifications for Jewish women. Israel already was problematic
for the equality of women: in 1997
Jewish Israeli women earned half as much in their jobs as did their male counterparts.
[LIPSCHITZ, M., p. 37] Since Israel's founding, only 6.8% of the member of
the Israeli parliament (Knesset) have been women. Most women who go into the
Israeli army serve in a special unit called
chen (Hebrew for "charm.") The
first female mayor elected to a town in Israel was not Jewish; she was Violet
Khoury, an Arab woman in the Arab village of Kfar Yassif. [POPE, V., p. 202-211]
Of especially momentous consequence to women, there is no
civil
marriage or divorce permitted in Israel; such matters -- as well as rulings
on child custody, deaths, and so on, in a standing compromise with the secular
government -- are controlled by the Orthodox rabbinate. "Among Jews,"
says Juliet Pope,

"these matters are ruled by rabbinical
courts which not only prohibit

women from serving as judges but even ban
the appearance of women

as witnesses. According to Jewish law, a
woman cannot get a divorce

without the consent of her husband. Even
in extremely difficult cases

where a wife is physically abused or where
her husband is missing or

insane, the civil courts cannot grant her
a divorce ... A recent study

suggested that in Israel there are currently
as many as 7,000 women,

termed
agunot, who have been refused divorce, many of them subject

to blackmail and extortion." [POPE,
p. 216, 217]

The oppression of women under Orthodox Jewish
law even includes bigamy. "In several cases," notes Israeli lawyer
Uri Huppert,

"and they are not rare, the rabbinical
tribunal [in Israel] permits a

husband to take an additional wife. Thus
criminal law in Israel

allows Jews to practice bigamy when it has
been permitted, with

certain limitations, by the Chief Rabbinical
Council ... In only the

year 1984-85, seventy-six requests were
approved in Israel to

marry an additional wife. For the same period,
in Jerusalem alone,

eighteen such requests were granted."
[HUPPERT, U., 1988, p. 167]

In 2000, due to Orthodox political influence,
"women who worship in prayer shawls or chant from Torah scrolls at the
Western Wall, the holiest shrine in Judaism, could go to prison for seven
years under new legislation proposed by Israel's parliament, the Knesset."
[VENTURA COUNTY STAR, 6-3-2000, p. A10]

Ironically, increasing Orthodox domination
of Israeli society profoundly threatens many Jewish Americans' myths about
Israel. For many, it is even threatens their very
identity as Jews. Whatever people who have only a Jewish father think
of themselves (as well as converts to Reform and Conservative versions of
Judaism, and a number of other categories), many are shocked to discover in
visits to Israel that they are, by the Orthodox standards that govern such
matters in Israel, not Jewish.

Not only that. Because marriages, burials, and governance for Jewish identity
itself are Orthodox-controlled and so-sanctioned by the Israeli government,
Jews who align themselves with more liberal Reform or Conservative Judaism
are prevented from fully expressing their religious beliefs in Israel. As
Reform rabbi Uri Regev, head of the Israel Religious Action Center, frames
it: "Israel is the only country in the free democratic world which ...
denies Jews religious freedom." [HYMAN, M., 1998, p. 107]

************************

Whatever else the modern
Jewish nation is,
it is a military state: a heavily armed Jewish collective. Jewish youth (with
a few exceptions, for example, chassids) after age 18 must join the military,
men for three years and women for two. Men must also serve time every year
(generally 30-60 days) in the ranks until they are age 55. "Compulsory
military service," observes Hanna Herzog, "reserve duty, and Israel's
recurring wars have made the Israel Defense Force (IDF) a staple of the Israeli experience and a key to Israeli identity
... A significant portion of the socialization of Israeli youngsters is related
to preparations for military service." [HERZOG, H., 1998]

"Israel has been an armed camp and
its entire population a citizen army," says Laurence Silberstein, "The
social and cultural consequences of a virtually total conscription policy
have been far-reaching and significant. The army has been the meeting place
for all Israelis ... For the [Jewish] immigrant, the army has served, by conscious
plan, as a primary school of Israel's socialization." [SILBERSTEIN, p.
34] "Military status is the single most important measure of social status
for young men," adds Zev Chafets, "To volunteer for an elite combat
unit is the equivalent of attending an Ivy League university." [CHAFETS,
p. 212] "Being a professional soldier in Israel," says Adam Garfinkel,
"is a very high status profession. Being a member of an elite battalion,
such as the Golani Brigade, is the dream of thousands of boys ... The Ministry
of Defense is usually thought of as the key civilian cabinet post [in the
government] ... In Israel, children generally stay in the same group all the
way through school and go into the army together ... They ... know by second
nature how to function and think as a unit ... Army service for immigrants
or their children has traditionally been the critical means of integrating
into the society, of learning the language, and of apprehending the zeitgeist
of the country." [GARFINKEL, p. 108-109, 113]

25-45% of the Israeli Gross National Product
is devoted to defense-related programs. [GARFINKEL, p. 115] (Despite its tiny size of only six million
people, by some estimates Israel is the fourth largest military power on earth).
Glenn Frankel noted in 1987 that Israel "still operated one of the most
centralized state-run economies this side of North Korea.
Bitahon, the Hebrew word for 'military
security,' dominated people's lives and dreams ... [Israelis] paid more than
half their income in taxes ... There was one television station and it was
state-owned ... Every Memorial Day Israel dispatched to its elementary schools
the parents of slain soldiers to tell the story of their children’s' sacrifice
and plant the seed of fear, pride, and determination in the new generation."
[FRANKEL, p. 24] "Memorialization
of the dead," says Myron Aronoff, "is a Leitmotiv in Israeli culture
... In fact, it has become so extensive and central to the political culture
that I suggest it has evolved into a national cult of memorializing the dead
... Regularized rites institutionalized by the IDF are held at 39 military
cemeteries throughout the country and two major monuments the day before the
celebration of Israel's Independence Day." [ARONOFF, p. 54]
Among those early Zionist heroes in Europe who have been reburied in
Israel include Moses Hess, Vladimir Jabotinsky, and Theodore Herzl. [ARONOFF,
p. 54]

Israel's self-image, says Glenn Frankel,
has been "a garrison-nation waving its defiant flag before implacable
enemies in a treacherous part of the world. Its unifying myths were the twin
traumas of Masada and the Holocaust. Its heroes were military men." [FRANKEL,
p. 23] "Israeli political history,"
says Adam Garfinkel, "is full of generals moving into politics. Yitzhak
Rabin, Ezer Weizman, Moshe Dayan, Yigal Allon, Ariel Sharon, Rafel Eytan,
Avigdor Kahalani, and Ehud Barak." [GARFINKEL, p. 188] Israel's first prime minister, Ben Gurion,
says Jacob Agus, believed that "the
golden age of Israel was not the rise of literary prophecy in the eighth century
before the Christian era, but the heroic generations of Joshua and the Judges
that captured the Holy Land and slaughtered its inhabitants [AGUS, p. 214]
... Men like Alexander Yannai, who could eat and drink while he watched with
delight the torment and crucifixion of his enemies, were the real heroes of
Jewish history. So were all the Maccabean rulers, including in particular
that moral monster, Herod the Great." [AGUS, p. 215] For the likes of
modern demagogue Meir Kahane, "force, violence, and domination seem the
very content of Jewish experience, its peak, as it were." [BLIDSTEIN]

"There exists," says Victor Azarya,
"a strong similarity between army culture and civilian popular culture.
Military slang and linguistic expressions are widely used in the civilian
society. Army overcoats and other clothing items set the pace for young people's
fashion [AZARYA, p. 102] ... The IDF [Israeli Defense Force] operates its
own radio station [broadcasting, by 1981, Israel's most popular radio channel,
Galei Zahal], publishes various
books, magazines and newspapers, and until a few years ago maintained a number
of musical and theatrical ensembles. The civic education objective is never
lost in these activities." [AZARYA, p. 111]

Like any nation , the modern state of Israel
has a discernible collective psychological attitude: a communal "personality."
It is formed at core by the conviction that Israelis as a Jewish island are
a people under constant siege by hostile goyim, immediately at hand manifest
by neighboring Arabs. A key ingredient of the Israeli public persona, much
championed, is that they are tough, macho, and emotionally hardened. And ruthless.
Israeli popular culture celebrates a rugged self-image through the symbol
of the "sabra" (literally meaning a cactus fruit, but colloquially
meaning a Jew born in Israel). In popular Israeli folklore, the Jews of Israel
are "thorny and tough on the outside, but soft inside."

This macho, mean Israeli self-image that
has developed is the result of a consciously promoted Zionist self-identity
towards a secular, redemptive inversion of the old Shylock Ghetto Jew image,
of which all were so ashamed. "These Jews, described as 'sheep who went
to the slaughter,'" says Carmon Arye, "have been perceived as the
antithesis of the self-image that has been inculcated into Israeli collective
consciousness." [ARYE, p. 76] "Puny, ugly, enslaved, degraded and
egoistic," said Nachum Syrkin, one of the foremost Zionist theorists,
"is the Jew when he forgets his great self; great, beautiful, moral and
social is the Jew when he returns to himself and recognizes his own soul."
[in RUBENSTEIN, A., p. 6] The necessity in Zionist leadership to replace a
perceived shameful communal past is noted by Jacques Kornberg:

an evening at a wealthy business friend's
home, Herzl wrote: 'Yesterday

a grand soiree at Treitel's. Around 30
to 40 ugly little Jews and Jewesses.

No consoling sight.'" [KORNBERG, p.
72]

Hence, Arab threat or not, the emphatic
inversion in modern Israel. "The predominant attitude in all walks of
life in Israel," noted Georges Tamarin in 1973, "both in the written
and spoken languages, tends to raise the sabra [image] to an idol-like stature
and a superman. This begins in the kindergarten, with tales in which the sabras
are depicted as free and
proud, in contrast to their inferior parents
from the Diaspora." [TAMARIN, p. 115]

The sabra image also has deep psychological
sources in the nationalist "lessons" learned from the Holocaust,
a situation where a perceived lack of Jewish physical force and power in the
diaspora (galut) throughout the world inevitably must -- sooner or later --
lead to disaster at the hands of Gentiles.

Ze'ev Chafets notes that

"It is impossible to underestimate
the centrality of the Holocaust in

the Israeli psyche ... This sense of fear
and rage is omnipresent. Every

anti-Israeli or anti-Jewish statement
or action feeds it, and people take

a perverse pleasure in collecting examples.
Not a day goes by without

press reports [in Israel] of persecution
of Jews in the Soviet Union, in

Syria, Iran, Argentina, Romania ... The
sense of persecution remains

the national glue ... A great many Israelis
have come to see the [Arab-

Israeli] conflict in an emotional way,
as a continuation of the Jewish

condition. And, since anti-Semitism is
a mysterious and irrational

disease, the tendency is to view the conflict
in irrational, almost fatalistic

terms." [CHAFETS, p. 100-101]

Zionism, in whatever form, has invariably
dovetailed with some of the central tenets of classical religious Judaism,
including the old "people apart" syndrome: Jewish alienation from
all other peoples. "The civil religion [of Israel]," notes Charles
Liebman and Eliezer Dov-Yehiya, "has been most forceful in asserting
that Israel is an isolated nation confronting a hostile world ... The growing
importance of traditional Judaism and Jewishness is associated with the centrality
of the Holocaust as the primary political myth of Israeli society, the symbol
of Israel's present condition and the one which provides Israel with legitimacy
... The Holocaust to a great extent fashions 'our national consciousness'
and the memory is omnipresent in Israeli society." [SAIDEL, p. 18]

"Israeli political culture," says
Israeli professor Myron Aronoff, "reflects not only the general theme
of the few against the many, but a growing emphasis of 'them against us' ...
The traditional concept of Esau hates Jacob [Gentiles hate Jews] and a nation
that dwells alone became explanations of reality and legitimization of Israeli
policy." [ARONOFF, p. 57] As
former lobbyist for Israel Doug Bloomfield once noted, some Israelis tend
to have a "You owe us" and "Screw the world" attitudes.
[STARR, J., 1990, p. 34] Zev Chafets remembers an Israeli concert he attended
in 1969, two years after he moved to Israel from America:

"As the show drew to a close, the group
swung into an up-temp number. 'Ha''olam
Ku'lo heg'denu,' they sang. 'The whole world is against us.' The audience
knew the song and joined in on the chorus ... [:] 'The whole world is against
us; never mind, we'll get by; we don't give a damn about them anyway.'"
[CHAFETS, p. 98]

(Peter Novick notes that this song was "at the
top of the charts" in Israel in 1973). [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 152]

Jewish scholar Daniel Niewyk notes the racist
dimension of the Zionist ideology of alienation from others, especially as
it developed in Germany:

"At the heart of the Zionist critique
of liberal assimilation lay the

conviction that Jews constitute a unique
race. It was the belief in

insurmountable racial differences that
made the inevitability of anti-

Semitism credible, just as it rationalizes
the view that every effort

to assimilate must go aground on the
barrier reef of biological

determinism ... [NIEWYK, p. 129] ...
The maintenance of that [racial]

purity was essential to German Zionism,
for it acknowledged

the essential prerequisite for nationhood
to be [in the 1922 words

of Zionist Fritz Kahn] 'consanguinity
of the flesh and solidarity of

the soul' together with the 'will to
establish a closer [Jewish]

brotherhood over [and] against all other
communities on earth."

[ NIEWYK, p. 130]

Amnon Rubenstein notes the disturbing irony
expressed in this world view of the Israeli people: "The establishment
of Israel was an attempt to make Jews like everybody else. They would now
have a state. It has not worked out that way. Israel has made Jews more, not
less, exceptional. The pariah people, it seems, have simply succeeded in creating
a pariah state." [RUBENSTEIN, A., p. 88] Perhaps, however, this situation is inevitable.
Unmentioned by Rubenstein is the religiously-based "nation apart"
self-concept always so deeply embedded in Jewish mass psychology, a self-understanding
and communal choice that apparently
cannot be shaken, even in a secular
nation-state context.

Non-Jewish scholar Virginia Dominguez, who
spent long periods of time in Israel in later years doing research, noted
the traditional Jewish narcissism and interest in pedigrees of identity expressed
by the Israelis she met:

"'What do you mean you say you are
not Jewish?' I was asked on

several occasions. 'That you're not religious?
That your mother

wasn't Jewish? That "we the Jews"
wouldn't count you as a Jew

because you had some Jewish ancestry but
not the right ones,

according to Halacha?' I was incredulous
at first. I had no way

then to anticipate this reaction. Everything
else seemed to point

to the importance of Jewishness, and to
controlling both the content

and limits of Jewishness." [DOMINGUEZ,
V., p. 179]

The omnipresent stresses of a predominantly
military state, the emphatic "we versus them" paradigm of traditional
Jewish identity, the glorification of power and aggression, millennia-old
disdain for non-Jews, and the emotional powder keg of Holocaust death camps
as a motivational tool has invariably led to the noxious Israeli persona that
is so much remarked upon by non-Israelis (often even Israelis themselves)
who spend much time in Israel. This "national character" is commonly
cited for its arrogance, insolence (chutzpah),
coldness, roughness, and rudeness, to begin a long list of unpleasant "uncivil"
attributes.

Many American Jews, in noting this Israeli
character, tend to romanticize it. "There is a coldness," notes
Jewish scholar Norman Cantor, "a mystery, a distance from humanity about
[Israelis] that anyone from another country who lives and works in Israel
for a half a year will be impressed by." [CANTOR, p. 417] "Israelis
have a reputation for bad manners," notes Jewish American immigrant to
Israel Charles Liebman, "to the extent this reputation is deserved it
stems from the sense of familiarity that Israelis feel towards one another."
[LIEBMAN, p. 21] In noting their "curt nature," Adam Garfinkle adds
that "Israelis are sometimes rude to an extent that it even bothers other
Israelis. In 1995, Bezek, the communication company, instituted a program
to get people to be more pleasant on the phone." [GARFINKLE, p. 113]
"The behavior of young Israelis," notes Israeli Jay Gonen,
" .... is characterized by a high degree of chutzpah or gall; it is direct,
blatant, unruly, clever, humorous, and indicates a certain lack of sensitivity
to social requirements ... [It has a] disregard for rules, regulations, social
norms, and good manners." [GONEN, p. 111] Melford Spiro, in his study
of the kibbutzim, discusses "insolence"
as an "outstanding characteristic of the sabras" (native-born Israelis).
[SPIRO, p. 427]

Herbert Russcol -- a Jewish American emigrant
to Israel -- and his sabra wife Margarit Banai noted the Israeli national
character this way:

"'Horror stories' about the chutzpah --
of the sabra-men, women, and children
alike -- are notorious. What appears to be (and
often is) their cheek, their
insolence, has shocked and enraged everyone
who has met them. Sabras freely
admit their chutzpah as a people, but are rarely
aware of being chutzpadik
themselves. They will tell you, 'Oh, we're terrible.
It's a national vice. I am
not so bad, but I have some very rude friends'
... Chutzpah is alarmingly close
to chauvinism, and it must be admitted that
the sabra is usually passionately
chaunvinistic in an era when no gospel has been
more discredited in the West
than blind, excessive patriotism ... Our young
[in the West] wish to be as
universal as blades of grass. But the young Israelis
cannot afford this, and
will tell you defensively, 'After all, you can't
build a nation without nationalism."
[RUSSCOL/BANAI, 1970, p. 170, 172]

"so highly prized by Israelis, scornful
of Westernized and 'assimilated'

manners, struck [Jewish] Americans [who
sought to live in Israel],

accustomed to some courtesies in life, as downright rude. (As late

as 1965, a study of bureaucratic behavior
in one large Israeli enterprise

disclosed that 60 per cent of officials
in contact with the public did

not believe in greeting a visitor, nor
would they reply to his greeting;

an even higher percentage would not offer
him a chair, simply letting

him stand during the interview)."
[UROFSKY, M., 1978, p. 274]

Such attributes, it may be recalled, are
among those that Jews have been noted for across the centuries of their diaspora.
Leon Poliakov rhetorically noted the inevitable echo here in the European
Jewish past: "Are the Jews congenitally unsociable and rude, or are they
this way as a result of having been segregated in ghettos? Such was the form
of the question in which arguments raged [among non-Jewish intellectuals]
in the 18th century on the eve of Emancipation." [CUDDIHY, Antisem,
p. ix]

As Joyce Starr notes:

"Among Americans who have had extensive
dealings with Israelis,

whether in government, business, or Jewish
circles, the first adjectives

that comes to their lips are
arrogant,
willful, and sometimes infuriating."

[STARR, J., 1990, p.. 31]

Ms. Starr, who is also Jewish, notes the
interchange she had with a man called J.R., "a high-ranking Israeli intelligence
officer":

"'Most Americans I interviewed in the government sphere --
the State

Department, Defense Department -- use certain
words when they describe

Israelis.'

'Arrogant,' J. R. replied.

'Yes, arrogant is a word that comes up
frequently.'

'By the way, I think it's true. It applies
to most Israelis. American

fairness and Israeli fairness are different.'

'What is Israeli fairness.'

'Israeli fairness is 'You give me 75
percent and leave 25 percent.'

'Do they know they do it?'

'Most of them do not. I think most of
them believe that by some divine

decree, they deserve to get everything.'

'What is divine decree?'

'It comes from God.' He saw me laughing.
'It's not funny, Joyce."

[STARR, J., 1990, p. 34]

"To the brief tourist," wrote
Leonard Wolf, a Jewish resident of Israel in 1970,

"[Israelis] are a rude, unsympathetic
people, intent on themselves,

irresponsive to nuances of feeling. Americans,
who are instantly,

if not profoundly, genial, are apt to find
the slow pace of Israeli

friendliness cold, comparing the Jewish
hotelkeepers and tourist

guides they meet unfavorably with the extraordinarily
warm Arabs."

[WOLF, L., 1970, p. 7]

In
2001, a Jewish ethnic newspaper, the Forward, noted that the national
Israeli propensity to be cheats and hustlers (always evasive of the law)
probably had roots in Jewish history in other lands:

"[There is] universal awareness that
something is definitely rotten in the state

of
Isael. This is, after all, a country in which bending the rules is said
to be a
national pasttime, cutting corners a way
of life and cheating the authorities
the proof of merit ... Sticklers for
the law are ridiculed and abused, where
anyone who works by the book is branded
a sap, a 'freier,' the worst insult
in modern Israeli lexicon ... Many people
believe Israeli laxity, which borders
on anarchy, is a national personality
trait that cannot be eradicated by laws
alone. Some trace the trait all the
way back to the historical Jewish Diaspora,
where Jews often found solace in bending
the rules imposed by the often
anti-Semitic authorities." [SHALEV,
C., 6-1-01]

In 1986, B. Z. Sobel, an Israeli sociologist
at the University of Haifa, discussed his research into reasons why so many
Israelis emigrate from Israel to other lands. Among the motivations for leaving,
he noted that "there is indeed an edginess [in Israeli society]; tempers
flare, and verbal violence is rampant ... A large proportion of those [Israelis]
interviewed for my study ... have been abroad [overseas] or were born or raised
abroad, and in almost all cases reference is made to the fact that 'people
are nice in chutz la'aretz.' Strangers
wish you a good day as they make change or pass you in the street, whereas
at home [Israel] you can consider yourself fortunate to receive minimally
civil treatment." [SOBEL, p. 153]

Among Sobel's interviews with fellow Jews
in Israel was one with an immigrant who had resided there for twelve years.
At some point in his interview with her, she "broke down and wept ...
repeating over and over the word 'garbage': 'People here are garbage, garbage.
They're hateful. I hate this place.'" [SOBEL, p. 153] Another interviewee, this one born Israeli,
when asked by Sobel why she was emigrating to the United States, "laughed
almost hysterically, and shouted, 'Why? Why? Because over there [in the United
States] I am a child of God, a child of God. I am treated like a human being
wherever I go. I am not shouted at our abused. Washer women in the supermarket
don't command me to watch my step. Why?'" [SOBEL, p. 153]

"Americans are much more polite, I
would say," remarked Israeli journalist Ze'ev Schiff, "while we
are rude and have no patience ... You can see it when some of us are waiting
in a queue in a bank or waiting for a bus ... This is the way we deal with
each other, with the Egyptians, the Europeans, whoever." [STARR, J.,
1990, p. 35] As Joyce Starr adds,
"The tension [in Israel] spills out in sudden eruptions of rudeness.
You can be standing in line in a gas station, and suddenly there will be an
outbreak of shouts and terrible cursing for no apparent reason except that
people explode in Israel." [STARR, J., 1990, p. 41]

Moshe Shokeid notes the comments of an Israeli
identified as "Eli," and his perceptions of the Israelis he met
in New York City:

"When I looked at the crowd, I subconsciously
saw myself in the

mirror. When you see other Israelis screaming
in Hebrew, you

realize that you possibly look the same.
Unfortunately, I rediscovered

the ugly Israeli." [SHOKEID, 1998,
p. 510]

In the 1980s, Virginia Dominguez, a non-Jewish
American sociologist of Cuban heritage, fluent in Hebrew and a Fulbright scholar
in Israel, worried that obnoxious Israeli behavior and Jewish self-obsession
threatened to push her into the camp of the anti-Semites:

"Has my obsessive, long-term encounter
with Israeli society over the

past six years turned me into the anti-Semite
I never was? I find myself

sharply intolerant of the noisy, brash
behavior of most Israeli children.

I coin terms of description that are even
explicitly judgmental. I get

exasperated with the perennial references
in the [Hebrew] media to the

Jewishness of well-known public figures
abroad." [DOMINGUEZ, p. 15]

Wendy Orange, a Jewish American, a new
immigrant to Israel, noted with irritation the commentary of a group of Christian
visitors she overheard in Jerusalem restaurant:

"I overheard one Ghanaian woman say,
'Just ghastly, these people!'

She's talking to a pregnant Irish woman,
who responded

wholeheartedly: 'I never imagined they'd
be so crude ... so rude.'

The Ghanaian, tall and dignified, her hair
wrapped high in a

colorful African sash, became more emphatic:
'No manners ...

They drive like madmen.' She paused. 'They
are far more

barbarian than I was warned. And I was warned,
my dear, many

times." [ORANGE, W., 2000, p. 52]

An American Jewish scholar, Adam Garfinkle,
noted his own child's experience in Israel's playgrounds:

"One day I saw two boys square off
in the playground, and one gave

the other a good pop to the chin. The
victim ran to the teacher and

complained that Yossi had hit him. The
teacher said, quite typically,

"Well, go hit him back." By
the time the child gets to first grade, he

knows not to embarrass himself by going to the teacher for such

matters. When [my son] Nate entered the
first grade in the states the

next year, we were not surprised to learn
that he was 'a bit rough' with

his friends." [GARFINKEL, p. 110]

In such an Israeli socialization of children,
Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, a professor in Israel, sees the classical Zionist
dynamic:

"A significant part of the Israeli
self-image is an ideal of toughness,

which is contrasted to the softness of
Diaspora Jews. The creation

of a separate new Israeli identity was
accomplished by many

expressions of contempt for any form of
weakness or moral

sensitivity." [BEIT-HALLAHMI, p.
238]

This harsh worldview, deeply aggrieved,
shamed and angered by the Holocaust, and "centuries of persecution,"
celebrates ruthless pragmatism as its interrelational essence. Exploiting
the Jewish suffering in the Holocaust as a moral shield from criticism, David
Ben-Gurion once proclaimed, "It is not important what Gentiles say, what
matters is what Jews do." [CHOMSKY, p. 236] Or as another Israeli prime minister (born in America), Golda Meir,
put it: "The nations of Europe who did not help us during the Holocaust
are not entitled to preach to us." [in RUBENSTEIN, A., p. 81]

In 1973, Georges Tamarin, an Israeli psychologist,
was alarmed at what he called the Israeli "cult of toughness," the
"Israeli authoritarian personality," and its attendant "traits
of ethnocentrism, glorification of strength and the prevailing admiration
of the army." [TAMARIN p. 80] "Aggressiveness, loudness, ignorance
of basic international expressions, and fascination with arms are held to
be grounds for pride." [TAMARIN, p. 116] Tamarin saw in such national
values an emphatic counter-construct and overcompensation against the embarrassing
image of the physically weak European "ghetto Jew." He noted the

"the constant preoccupation of Israeli
youth with physical strength and

courage and some caricaturist demonstrations
of toughness and '(he)

manhood (lack of inhibitions, loud speech,
the ideal of the [military]

parachutist, about whom all the women
are 'crazy,' overemphasis on

masculine symbols (in a style which is
a curious mixture of Biblical

and Hollywood-type narratives; see the
'Exodus') are dominant traits

of the Israeli authoritarian personality."
[TAMARIN, p. 87]

"Our negligence," complained Israeli
Meron Benvenisti in 1989, "of ... values such as the brotherhood of man,
social justice, and civil equality to all ha[s] led inexorably to chauvinism
and xenophobia ... It is tempting to take the easy way out and dismiss the
right-wing chauvinists and religious fundamentalists [in Israel] as an aberration,
as marginal, half-crazed fanatics. Yet very influential sections of Israeli
public opinion accept their philosophy, albeit considering them 'good boys
who slipped'." [BENVENISTI, p. 45]

In 1989 an American-born Jew, Aaron Wolf,
wrote a book about his experiences in the Israeli army. On one occasion after
the killing of some Arab combatants, says the author, "I cornered Alon,
the Chicagoan whose specialty is falling in love and who was one of the men
on that patrol. 'Hey, Alon,' I said, 'Tell me something. You've been trained
as a medic. You've had a three-month course learning how to save lives. How
do you feel now that you've killed somebody?' 'How do I feel?' he said. 'I
feel hungry.'" [WOLF, A., p. 171]

In 1989, Israeli commentators noted with
concern a rash of brash "Russian Roulette"-styled behaviors in the
country's youth. Groups of children were playing games of life and death daring
with passing cars and trains, leaping out, or lying down, in front of them.
Reuters called it a "deadly plague" happening to the Jewish
state. "Adults gamble," a Jerusalem high school teacher told the
wire service, "but the children have less money so they gamble with their
lives. I believe Israeli behavior on the roads is macho, and I this is the
way children without licenses behave in the streets." Reuters
also noted that "when Education Minister Yitzak Navon asked during a
school visit why pupils played the deadly game, students replied: 'To show
they're brave,' 'To tempt death,' and 'Just to show off.' [GOLLER]

Perhaps these children sought to emulate
their parents; driving cars dangerously is an Israeli tradition. Too many
people in Israel drive their automobiles like maniacs, daring death on the
highways. "Twice as many Israelis," notes Lesley Hazeleton, "were
killed on the roads during the Lebanon war as in the war itself. If a man
was driving particularly recklessly, people would say that he'd just come
back from reserve service in Lebanon. They were only half joking." [HAZELETON,
L., 1987, p. 214] From the founding of the Jewish state in 1948 to 1990, over
30,000 Israelis died in car accidents, more than twice the number of all the
Jews killed in Israeli wars in the same period. In the years 1985 and 1986,
a total of ten Israelis were killed by terrorists. Meanwhile, 893 people died
in car crashes on Israeli highways. Although Israel is a country of only about
six million people, between 1948 and 1990 nearly 630,000 people had been injured
in car accidents. [STARR, J., 1990, p. 42] As Joyce Starr noted in 1990,

"If the present pace of accidents continues,
two people in every

Israeli family will be injured, and one
person in every ten families will

be killed. The number of children killed
in auto accidents since 1967

is equivalent to almost a hundred grade
school classes." [STARR, J.,

1990, p. 42]

By 1999, the New York Times wire
services noted the concern in Israel that its collective aggressive psyche
was beginning to run amuck: "Israel has always had a rough edge, it has
always been a society where aggression and rudeness was accepted as by-products
of life under siege ... [But] after several exceptionally brutal crimes --
two men killed their wives and children and set their bodies on fire -- and
new studies detailing the level of brutality in the schools, there has emerged
an intense focus on violence among Israelis that has temporarily pushed aside
the historic focus on conflict with the Arabs." "We have to deal
with it exactly as we have with terrorism," said Ze'ev Friedman, "director
of health, welfare, and social services for the city of Tel Aviv, "...
because this is nothing less than an integral form of terrorism." [BRONNER,
p. 6] The same year a Tel Aviv Municipality study found that 12.5 percent
of the homes in the Tel Aviv-Jaffa area (the largest population density in
Israel) were tainted by domestic violence. [FISHBEIN, 12-22-99]

In 2000, Israel's National Council for the Welfare
of the Child noted in its annual report the alarming rise in violence emanating
from Israel's youth. "Complaints of violence by children in educational
institutions" rose by 227% from 1995 to 1999. There were 29,000 criminal
investigations of minors in 1999 alone. Also between 1994 and 1999, the number
of children under 12 seeking help from call-in hotlines because of sexual
abuse rose from 143 to 603. "I have no othe words to describe it than
to say our society is undergoing a process of bestialization," declared
Dr. Asher Ben-Arye, the deputy-general of the National Council, and the editor
of the disturbing report. By 2001, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported
that "Israel, one of the world's smallest countries, ranks eighth in
the world in youth violence." [HAARETZ, 4-18-01] That same year, Miss
Israel, Ilanit Levy, wore a diamond-studded bullet-proof vest as a fashion
statement at the Miss Universe competition. [WASHINGTON POST, 4-18-01]

In 2001, Great Britain's online Telegraph newspaper noted

'Israelis -- who take pride in being blunt and
outspoken -- are to teach children
good manners in an attempt to cut the nation's
tendency towards violence. From
the next school year, 12-year-olds will be taught
how to behave politely, which
knife and fork to use at table, and how to resolve
arguments without shouting or
coming to blows. Ronit Tirosh, director-general
of the Education Ministry said:
'We are a brutal and impatient society, and
the delicacy learned through these
lessons may reduce our society's violent tendencies.'
Israelis are proud not to
say thank you and relish the informality of
life ... Israeli life is a bruising contest
of one-upmanship. The deepest fear is to be
thought a 'sucker' who obeys
the rules. Brusqueness has been cultivated by
native-born Israelis as a reaction
against the manners of Europe's Diaspora Jews, who
were seen as cringing
and subservient ... Educationalists have become
worried about the level
of playground violence." [PHILIPS, A.,
6-15-01]

In 1999 the mood in Israel was such that
an Israeli court was expected to give a convicted Israeli murderer of a British
tourist a reduced sentence because of flashbacks he had of his military work
executing Arabs. Major Daniel Okev claimed he murdered Gentile hitch-hiker
Max Hunter and wounded his girlfriend

"during a flashback to his days in
a secret Israeli hit squad which

targeted suspected Palestinian terrorists
for summary execution ...

When he found himself at night in his car
with two strangers,

Okev said he believed he had a flashback
to similar occasions on

operations in Gaza. He looked down and
saw his gun, sparking the

murder." [REES, M., p. 12]

Traditional Jewish "chutzpah"
is of course an integral part of the Israeli identity. "To a large degree," says Israeli
professor Jay Gonen, "... Herzl's impact [on Jewish nationalism] was
due to a quality of chutzpah, or unmitigated gall, which became an integral
part of Zionism and was subsequently elevated almost to an art form by native-born
Israelis, or sabras." [GONEN, p. 47] An example of how far this chutzpah
can go was evidenced in an incident during the Palestinian uprising -- known
as the Intifada -- that began in 1987 against Israeli occupation in Gaza and
the West Bank. Of the hundreds of Palestinians shot and killed or wounded by Israeli troops in the Intifada's first year,
one young Arab teenager, Nasir Hawwash, was shot in the head and lay in a
hospital, irrecoverably brain dead. One day Nasir's brother received a telephone
call from a Jewish Israeli citizen, an emissary for the family of a fellow
middle-aged Israeli in the hospital
with a serious heart condition. The stranger on the phone asked that the Hawwash
family donate Nasir's heart to save the Jewish man in the hospital who needed
it.

"Nasir's older brother," notes
Glenn Frankel, "was appalled that an Israeli would ask such a thing.
She told him, 'This is how we'll make peace between Arabs and Jews.' He was
not buying it. 'How can you make peace when you shoot someone and then you
take the heart to give life to another Israeli?' he told her."

As the story for the heart request made
the Israeli news, one Palestinian "radical" noted that "If
we give the Israelis this heart, soon they'll be shooting us for our organs."
[FRANKEL, p. 110-111] The Arab boy's father was eventually offered "more
money than [his] family would have seen in a lifetime" for his son's
heart, but he told the Israeli pleaders no. "What did they want from
me?" he asked. "This was my son. They took him away, then they wanted
his body. This I could not give." [FRANKEL, p. 111]

*********************************************

In 1967, a landmark year in Jewish and Israeli
history, the Jewish state began a self-described "pre-emptive" attack
against Egypt, overcoming their Arab adversaries in six days.
"The ideological and practical ramifications of the Six-Day War,"
says Amnon Rubenstein, "were so all-encompassing in Israeli thinking
and politics that there is justification for regarding it as a turning point
in Zionist and Israeli history." [RUBENSTEIN, A., p. 76] This included
the victorious Israeli army expanding Jewish-controlled territory into what
has become known as the Occupied Territories: Gaza, the West Bank, and the
Golan Heights. A pro-Israel euphemism is the "administered territories."

Gaza is a thin strip of land on the Mediterranean
Sea 4-8 miles wide and 30 miles long that is today the reservation for over
800,000 stateless Arabs. The West Bank is an area west of the Jordan River;
the Golan Heights borders Syria in the north. Since 1967 Israelis have in
these places "controlled every facet of Palestinian life." [RUBENSTEIN,
A., p. 63]

In 1973, Syria and Egypt launched surprise
attacks upon Israel on one of its holy days, Yom Kippur. Israel barely managed
to avoid defeat; the United States' supply of arms to Israel was "crucial."
[RUBENSTEIN, A., p. 77]

In 1987 a popular Arab uprising against
Israeli rule began, sparked by a car
accident (driven by a Jew) that killed four Arab pedestrians in Gaza. Rioting
quickly spread to other parts of the Occupied Territories -- East Jerusalem
and the West Bank; the grass-roots revolt dragged on for years. Largely expressed
by the hurling of stones at Israelis, public defiance, and burning tires in the streets, the Palestinians
called it the "Intifada."
Strikes were initiated against Israeli rule, some groups refused to continue
to pay taxes. As rioting escalated, then-Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak
Rabin called for "might, force, and beatings." [PELEG, I., p. 170]
The Jewish state also responded by establishing curfews, cutting off electricity
and phone lines, and accelerating arrests. "In an effort to reduce the
large numbers of shooting deaths," says Amnon Rubenstein, "the IDF
implemented a policy of beating demonstrators with the intention of breaking
bones. This new approach was loudly condemned by the international community,
and soon soldiers reverted to the more frequent use of live ammunition, supplemented
by deadly plastic and rubber bullets." [RUBENSTEIN, A., p. 97]

In 1988 plastic bullets were provided to
Israeli troops, but by January 1989 47 Arabs were yet killed with such ammunition.
[GOLDSTEIN, E., p. 44] In the first
30 months of unrest, 837 Arabs were killed -- 688 by gunfire, 61 by beatings,
and 88 from tear gas inhalation; over
1,000 Palestinian homes were demolished. 90,000 Arabs sought medical treatment
for wounds, broken bones, tear gas inhalation and other inflictions of Jewish
occupation. Colleges and universities
were shut down by Israeli authorities, various Palestinian administrative
organizations were banned, tens of thousands of orchard trees were destroyed
by Israeli troops, and both Gaza and the West Bank were placed under military
curfew. [RUBENSTEIN, A., p. 99-100]

Between 1987 and 1994, 2,156 Palestinians
were killed, most by Israeli soldiers. Dozens were killed by Jewish settlers
and vigilantes. Over 120,000 Arabs were imprisoned. [FRANKEL, p. 377] In the first thirty months of the Intifada
20% of the Arab dead were 16 years old or younger. [RUBENSTEIN, A., p. 99]
The human rights group Middle East Watch wrote that despite the fact that
Israeli law declares that "all news reports be submitted to the military
censor prior to publication [GOLDSTEIN,
E., p. 176] ... hundreds of [news] correspondents have traveled extensively
throughout the territories during the Intifada, their reporting on human rights
conditions has provoked international sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians."
[GOLDSTEIN, E., p. 64] As Jewish author
Marc Ellis noted in 1990:

"The resistance on the part of the Jewish
community to what one

might call the Nazi analogy [to Israeli violence
against Arabs during

the Intifada] is understandable and so strong
as to virtually silence

all such references. Yet during the brutal
attempt to suppress the

Palestinian uprising, in fact from the very
beginning the Jewish

struggle for statehood in Palestine in the
1940s and continuing to

the present, the connection between the Jewish
experience of

suffering in Europe and the Palestinian experience
of suffering

at the hands of the Jewish people in Palestine
and Israel has been,

and continues to be, repeatedly made by Jewish
Israelis."

[ELLIS, M., 1990, p. 108]

Jewish American journalist Glenn Frankel
noted the murder of Hani Elshami, "beaten to death for protecting his
son from arrest," his "limp body" beaten further after it was
"dumped at a prison camp"; the much-publicized story of three soldiers
who buried alive (with a bulldozer) four Palestinian stone-throwers; and the
case of CBS News' 45 minutes of footage depicting four soldiers beating two
Arabs on the ground. "Such a beating," noted Israeli soldier Saguay
Harpaz, "was the norm. That's the way it was. Every day." [FRANKEL,
p. 80, 81] Israeli soldier Omer Rasner
noted what he told his parents about his activities against the Intifada:
"They didn't understand how their little child could become such a beast."
[FRANKEL, p. 85] Most of what Israeli troops faced during Arab unrest was
stone-throwing. Yet, "for the
first eighteen months of the Intifada," wrote Frankel, "... [Israeli]
soldiers killed a Palestinian a day. By contrast, the highly trained riot
police of South Korea, faced with a steady barrage of firebombs and brutal
attacks, killed a total of one person during a constant year of unrest."
[FRANKEL, G., p. 83]

In 1990 the Swedish branch of the Save the
Children Fund estimated that between 50,000 and 60,000 Palestinian children
had been treated for injuries; 6,500 of them were hurt by gunfire. The report,
notes Victor Ostrovsky, "said most of the children killed had not been
participating in stone-throwing when they were shot, and one-fifth of the
cases examined showed that the victims were shot either at home or within
thirty feet of their homes." [OSTROVSKY, p. 333]
"The Intifada and resultant breakdown of moral order and humanity
[in Israeli society]," suggested Ostrovsky, "are a direct result
of the kind of megalomania that characterizes the operation of the Mossad
[Israel's CIA] ... It is a disease that began with Mossad and has spread through
the government and down through much of Israeli society." [OSTROVSKY,
p. 336]

During the Intifada, noted Eric Goldstein,
principal author of a 1990 report by Middle East Watch, "scores of Palestinians
have been killed while fleeing [Israeli troops] ... The conduct of the IDF,
taken cumulatively, more closely resembles what would be appropriate to a
situation of combat, with the result that many Palestinians are killed outside
of life-threatening situations for [Israelis]." [GOLDSTEIN, E., p. 23]
As the Intifada intensified, the Israeli army was issued guidelines
that permitted soldiers "to use live ammunition to apprehend masked persons
whether or not they were armed." [GOLDSTEIN, E., p. 38] Among the tens
of thousands arrested was Taher Shriteh, an Arab journalist in Gaza, who was
working for CBS News. Accused of illegal use of a FAX machine, illegal publication
of information about Palestinians killed by Israeli troops, and the like,
Shriteh spent 38 days in prison -- two and a half years later, his trial was
still pending. [FRANKEL, p. 259-261]

Israeli Ilan Peleg notes that of the various
human rights reports that were published about the Intifada in the occupied
territories, they

"paint a picture in which widespread
abuse of human rights and

violations of the norms of international
law occur with relative

frequency in the Arab territories under
Israeli control [PELEG, I.,

p. 169] ... Even the annual human rights
report of the [U.S.]

Department of State, usually a relatively
mild document, is rather

harsh in dealing with human rights violations
in the territories. The

report criticizes human rights practices,
stating that Israeli troops

'caused many avoidable deaths and injuries'
by using gunfire in

situations that did not present mortal danger
to the troops. The

report also documents cases in which Palestinian
detainees 'died

under questionable circumstances' while
in detention or 'were

clearly killed by the detaining officials.'"
[PELEG, I., p. 170]

"I want to tell you the truth,"
eventual Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin once admitted, "For 27 years the Palestinians ... have risen
in the morning and cultivated a burning hatred for us as Israelis and Jews.
Every morning they awake to a difficult life and it is partly our fault ...
It cannot be denied: the continued rule of a foreign people who does not want
us has a price. This is first of all a painful price, the price of constant
confrontation between us and them." [FRANKEL, G., p. 377]

During the Intifada uprising in 1987 and
1989, the American Jewish Committee sponsored surveys of American Jewry. Nearly
two-thirds of the respondents, notes Penkower, agreed that "aside from
a few regrettable incidents, Israel has used a reasonable and appropriate
level of violence in the West Bank and Gaza (only 12% disagreed)." [PENKOWER,
p. 331]

Matti Golan, an Israeli, notes with concern
the Jewish-American moral bankruptcy
in their complacent support of Israel's mistreatment of Arabs:

"What the occupation is doing to us
as human beings ... [is] something

that threatens to wreak irreparable damage
to the fabric of our lives]

while turning us into a brutal and insensitive
society. Such a society

is not one in which I would want to belong
to. And yet [American Jews]

media revealed that the director of the
GSS [General Security Service]

had ordered two Palestinian terrorists
killed without trial and had lied

to an official committee of inquiry ...
In several of my talks in the

United States, I expressed the opinion
that, even if the episode damaged

Israel's image abroad, it was crucial to
bring it to light, because in a

democratic society not even the security
apparatus should be allowed

to be above the law. Not a single American
Jewish audience enjoyed

hearing that. The almost universal reaction
to what I said was: Yes, but

why wash our dirty linen in public? ...
When it comes to [Israel,

American Jews] practically demand that
I should say to hell with

democratic principles. It's not so terrible
if Israeli officials and

government agencies take the law into their
own hands. It's not good,

but there are worse things. And one of
these is a tarnished image.

Indeed, I sometimes think that as long
as Israel's image in America

remains decent and humane, you wouldn't
care if in actual fact we

were a society of cannibals." [GOLAN,
M., p. 44]

As published in a report called "Captive
Corpses" by the Israeli human rights organizations B'Tselem and
HaMoked, even the Arab dead may be abused by Israelis -- particularly
the corpses of so-called "suicide bombers" who seek, in their last
actions, to kill Jews. These Arab dead, notes Israeli professor Neve Gordon,
"are not only buried in a demeaning and shameful manner, but ... Israel
refuses to return bodies to the bereaved families ... Israel's treatment of
enemy corpses exposes an atavistic policy informed by vindictiveness instead
of justice. Privileging nationalistic sentiments over democratic practice
has led Israel to punish people -- the perpetrator's bereaved family -- who
are neither guilty nor even suspect. Not unlike other measures Israel takes,
such as demolition of homes, holding corpses hostage constitutes collective
punishment of innocent persons." [GORDON, N., 1999]

In September of 2000 the second Palestinian
uprising against Jewish oppression began. Russian/Israeli Israel Shamir noted
its tenor:

"Another email comes into my
laptop, this time from Gaza. An American girl,
Alison Wier from San Francisco evades Israeli
bullets, comforts the
scared Palestinian kids, and writes: 'The problem
is when you know the
truth, it is far too cruel, far too diametrically
oppostite what we used
to think and what everyone thinks to express.
The lie is too big, the
repression too complete, the Palestinians' lives
too horrible to write
about reasonably.'
Well, Alison is right. We face a huge
lie, an anti-Moslem blood libel."
[SHAMIR, I., 2001]

Despite
all this, the modern state of Israel frames itself as a democracy and
Jewish American supporters are quick to proudly underscore its noble mantle
as the "only democracy in the Middle East." As Gabriel Sheffer notes,

"Early on in the history of the Jewish
state, its leaders realized

that maintaining a democratic polity is
not only of great value in

itself, but is also a potentially important
asset in promoting Israel's

relations with Western states and especially
with the United States ...

Consequently, Israel's leaders promoted
the notion that democracy

was the cornerstone of its 'special relationship'
with the U.S. and

with other western democracies ... This
view has been repeated in

countless speeches made by Israelis, Americans,
and European

politicians and officials and has become
a significant element in

justifying the level of political, military,
economic, and financial

support given to Israel." [SHEFFER,
p. 32]

The term "democracy," when it
comes to Israel, however, is a very relative term. The Israeli claim of democracy
is drastically different than any other in western societies and must be stretched
thinly to veil a range of extremely undemocratic, Judeo-centric principles
to diffuse the hard reality: Israel is an expressly
Jewish state created especially for
Jewish citizens, with all the racism, injustice,
oppression of non-Jews, and ethnocentrism this might be expected to entail.
The crucial "truth" test of any so-called "democracy"
are the formal policies towards, legal status of, and resulting condition
of all a country's citizens -- a test Israel emphatically fails. Arabs
and other non-Jews are systematically and institutionally marginalized, often
humiliated, and exploited in all walks of life.

Israeli sociologist Sammy Smooha notes that

"Israel's ethnic nature is well evident
today. The state claims to be the

homeland of the Jews only. The dominant
language is Hebrew, while

Arabic is degraded to an inferior status.
The institutions, official

holidays, symbols, and heroes are exclusively
Jewish. The major

law of immigration [to Israel] admits Jews
freely but excludes

Palestinian Arabs. Israel confers a special
standing on the [private

international funding agencies] Jewish Agency and the Jewish National

Fund which, by their own constitutions,
cater to Jews only. Laws

and settlement policies are geared to further
the interests of Jews only ...

[SMOOHA, S., p. 326] It is part of the
national consensus to keep

Arabs a nonassimilating minority, just
as it is to keep Jews a

nonassimilating majority ... Independent
Arab organizations are

denied official recognition, and government
and quasi-government

offices refuse to deal with them directly."
[SMOOHA, p. 331]

"The Law of Return," notes Israeli
author Avirama Golan, "gives every Jew [in the world] the automatic right
to citizenship, and Israeli citizenship, therefore, is bound to halakhic definitions
and the Orthodox monopoly and creates blatant, undemocratic discrimination."
[GOLAN, A., 2001] [Note, in another chapter, a
range of questionable Israeli ethical/unethical activities]

"Three-and-a-half million Jewish Israelis,"
said a former Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, Meron Benvenisti, in 1987, "hold
total monopoly over governmental resources, control the economy, form the
upper social stratum and determine the educational and national values and
objectives of the republic ... Though [Arabs] are citizens of the [Israeli]
republic, their citizenship does not assure them equality under the law ...
There is a perpetual conflict, not necessarily violent, between the Jewish
majority group that seeks to maintain its superiority, and the Arab minority
group that seeks to free itself from majority tyranny." [RUBENSTEIN,
A., p. 89-90]

"There remain unresolved issues of
democracy in Zionist thought and certainly in the Zionist state," says
Zvi Gitelman, "Among them is the question of whether Israel can both
be an 'ethnic state' -- that is, a Jewish state -- and a 'civic state' --
one for all of its citizens, including the nearly 20 percent who are not Jews."
[GITELMAN, Z., 1997]

In 1980, Jewish author Ian Lustick wrote
an entire academic volume about the ways that Israel's Arab citizens are "controlled"
in the Jewish democracy. "What explains the existence within Israel,"
he asks, "of a substantial community [Arabs] with virtually no independently
operated industrial, commercial or financial institutions, no independent
political parties, and almost no command over the attention or interest of
the mainstream [Jews] of Israeli society?" [LUSTICK, I., 1980, p. 24]
His answer entails the three "components" that he identifies which
"form a 'system' which does result in control" --
segmentation,
dependency, and
cooptation. Segmentation, Lustick says, "refers to the isolation
of the Arab minority from the Jewish population and the Arab minority's internal
fragmentation." Dependency "refers to the enforced reliance of Arabs
on the Jewish majority for important economic and political resources."
Cooptation "refers to the use of side payments to Arab elites or potential
elites for purposes of surveillance and resource extraction." [LUSTICK,
I., 1980, p. 77] Lustick also notes the institutionalized undercurrent of
the Jewish police state:

"The regime's fundamental distrust
of the Arab minority has been

reflected in the fact that five of the six
men who have served as

Adviser to the Prime Minister on Arab Affairs
-- Yehoshua Palmon,

Uri Lubrani, Shmuel Divon, Rehavam Amid,
and Shmuel Toledano --

were recruited for that post from the secret
services." [LUSTICK, I.,

1980, p. 66]

"Imposed legal measures," noted
Micheal Roman and Alex Weingrod years later, "institutional frameworks,
and allocations of economic resources are all designed to consolidate the
Jewish demographic, spatial, and economic dominance [over Arabs], and are
often based upon ethnic differentiation [ROMAN/WEINGROD, p. 226] ... Putting
it succinctly, under the present structure of political and economic power
the trend has inevitably been toward a system of 'separate but unequal.'"
[p. 228]

Israeli Bernard Avishai poses a troubling
question to American Jews who everywhere herald and propagandize about
the "democracy" of modern Israeli: "[Jewish] Israelis
enjoy many civil liberties, but the state also enforces important laws and
economic regulations which contradict democratic ethics. What American Jews,
for example, would want to live in an America without civil marriage, or which
only certified Christians were permitted to buy certain properties?
... Some of the reasons for Israel's failure as a democracy are internal
to the logic of the Zionist revolution." [AVISHAI, B., p. 9]

"From the very beginning of the Zionist
endeavor," says Israeli Jay Gonen, "most Zionists displayed a blind
spot in their view of Arabs ... The absence of Arabs from the Jewish visual
field was sometimes total." [GONEN, p. 182] "Public opinion surveys
in Israel," add Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen, "regularly exclude
non-Jews, even though they make up roughly a sixth of the population."
[LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 24] "There are over 14,000 Arab graduates of Israeli
universities," says Keith Kyle, "but of some 5,000 academic posts
only 20 are held by Arabs." [KYLE, K., p. 253]

One of these few Arab academics is Majid
Al-Haj, a senior lecturer in the Sociology and Anthropology Department at
Haifa University. He notes that "It has been repeatedly emphasized that
formal policy towards the Arabs in Israel is directed by three main considerations:
the democratic principle, the Jewish-Zionist principle, and security considerations.
While the first drives toward equality and integration of Arabs, the other
two pull in the opposite direction. When these features are juxtaposed, it
is clear that Jewish-Zionist and security considerations have gained the upper
hand." [Al-Haj, M., 148]

"To [Israeli political scientist Ze'ev
Sternhall]," note Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen, "Israeli political
culture rejects the basis of democratic thought -- that 'society and state
exist in order to serve the individual ... and are never ends in themselves.'
Sternhall traces Israel's collectivist culture to the Jewish tradition, among
other elements. He maintains that even the non-religious Zionists never really
freed themselves from the traditions of their father's home, and in one form
or another they deferred to 'Yisrael Saba.' In this view
of Sternhall and others like him, Israel needs urgently to overcome
its inherent anti-democratic and anti-liberal Jewish identity." [LIEBMAN/COHEN,
p. 119]

"In recent years," notes political
scientist Arend Aijphart, "Israeli democracy has been subjected to frequent
and increasing criticism, both by Israelis themselves and foreign berserkers
... Many people believe that there is something seriously and fundamentally
wrong with Israeli democracy." [LIJPHART, p. 107] "What matters in the Israeli-Jewish perception,"
says Liebman and Cohen, "is that liberalism -- support for individual
rights for minorities -- offers the Jews no protection." [LIEBMAN/COHEN,
p. 118] "Israel is unique in
the Western world," says Sammy Smooha, "for remaining an ethnic
state (i.e., a state identified to serve one of its constituent population
groups). Such a structure is bound to clash with political democracy, which
is based on the principle of equal rights and equal treatment of all citizens."
[SMOOHA, p. 325]

Smooha cites four central foundations of
the systematic slighting of non-Jewish civil rights and injustice in Israel:

1) The lack of a formal Israel Constitution
or Bill of Rights as final law.

2) The legal technicality that Israel continues
to function in a perpetual

state of emergency (per the threat of
local Arab attack).

3) The central premises of the Jewish-Zionist nation is intrinsically

discriminatory to non-Jews.

4) Jewish public opinion in Israel supports
restrictions upon Arabs and

privileges for Jews. [SMOOHA, p. 328]

The lack of a formal Constitution serves
to avoid a formal expression of what exactly Israel's intentions and goals
are, thereby diffusing the issues of final Jewish state boundaries, the role
of Jewish religious Orthodoxy in government, and the legal rights of non-Jews.
Existing laws can be changed at any time. According to Noam Chomsky, "[Israeli
prime minister] Ben Gurion wrote that 'a Jewish state ... will serve as an
important and decisive stage in the realization of Zionism,' but only a
stage:
the borders of the state 'will not be fixed for eternity' but will expand
either by agreement with Arabs 'or by some other way,' once 'we have force
at our disposal' in a Jewish state. His long term vision included Jordan and
beyond, sometimes even 'the land of Israel' from the Nile to the Euphrates." Another Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir, once said that "The
borders are determined by where Jews live, not where there is a line on the
map." [CHOMSKY, N., p. 236]

Among the important discriminations against
the Arabs of Israel (approximately 18% of the total population), are those
veiled by laws that prohibit Arabs (with few exceptions) from serving in the
army. "Army service is a major gateway to rights and privileges in Israel,"
notes Adam Garfinkel, "and as a result, Israeli Arabs are saddled with
major disadvantages." [GARFINKEL, p. 105] Because of the focus on army
service as the key to social and economic benefits, "the bulk of discrimination,"
says Sammy Smooha, "is ... covert." [SMOOHA, p. 328]

Not
so terribly invisible were the revelations of an Association for Civil Rights
in Israel study in 1999. Of the 13,000 people who worked for the Israeli Electric
Corporation, six (0.00046 percent) were Arabs. Only five percent of all Israeli
civil service jobs were filled by Arabs; most of these jobs could only be
filled by Arabs as they served, intimately and in close quarters, Israel's
segregated Arab community. Of these Arab civil service workers, half did not
have tenure in their positions, and one-third were doing temporary work. [DAYAN,
A, 12-19-99]

By 1993, 60% of Israeli Arab children lived
in what was officially considered poverty (three times the percentage of Jews).
"Their parents," notes Keith Kyle, "not having served in the
IDF [Israeli Defense Force], get child allowances two or three times smaller
than those available to most Jews with children." [KYLE, p. 253] A more blatant discriminatory device is the
Israeli national identity card, required of all citizens, which states whether
the bearer is Jewish or Arab.

"Jewish landlords have often refused
to rent their premises to Arabs," notes Micheal Roman and Alex Weingrod,
[p. 39] "... There can be little doubt that one of the major features
of Jewish-Arab relationships is the predominant force of persistent, widespread
segregation ... Residential segregation has remained practically complete.
No mixed Jewish-Arab neighborhoods have developed during the more than two
decades of coexistence." [p. 221] In
1999, a major Israeli legal case brewed when a prosperous Arab, Fathi
Muhammed, sought to live in a home in Katzir, like most of the best living
areas, a purely Jewish town. "The actions of Fathi Muhammed," notes
the Boston Globe, "set off a court battle that has drawn attention
to Israel's treatment of its Arab minority, who have full citizenship yet
face discrimination in almost all areas." [MARCUS, A., 8-5-99, p. A1]
The hard details of the such a land/home purchase, however, are elusive; most
land in Israel is leased -- not purchased
-- for long terms from the Zionist government, thus insuring indefinite
Jewish control of Israel's physical terrain.
In the Katzir case, the land is leased from the government by the gigantic
Jewish Agency, an organization that has a singular Zionist interest in aiding
Jews in Israel.

Traditional anti-democratic Jewish religious
tenets are also an integral part of Israel's "democracy."
There is little pretense of a "separation of church and state,"
a mainstay in western democracies and a principle emphatically demanded, and
enforced, by Jews in other countries. Among the examples
of traditional Jewish, anti-universalist religious dogma in Israeli's "democracy"
is that it is illegal for a Jew to marry a non-Jew in the Jewish state. And
because religious Jews hold the Sabbath (Saturday) to be a day of rest, this
period of work shutdown is enforced by public institutions with repercussions
upon everyone (Muslims, Christians, and other non-Jews). One consequence of
this Jewish religious dictate, for example, is the nation-wide closing of public transportation
on Saturdays. "There are few democracies in the world," notes Zev
Chafets, "where spiritual leaders are so blatantly involved in the action.
Some of Israel's most venerable rabbis are power brokers who cut deals with
the secular pols over money, legislation, and patronage with all the restraint
and dignity of Tammany ward heelers." [CHAFETS, p. 153]

In 1988, the Minister of Interior for the
Israeli government, Rabbi Yitzhak Peretz (head of the Shas party) visited
a Bedouin community in Israel's southern desert and took the occasion to remark
that

"It is written in the Torah that it
is essential for each nation to preserve

its character and breed. This is the guarantee
for peace among nations.

Intermixture leads to hatred, conflict,
and war. Since I would like to

live in peace, I do not hold with excessively
close association between

Jewish and Arab youth. At a tender age meetings
of this type give rise

to love; love leads to marriage. This is
neither good nor healthy."

[HUPPERT, U., 1988, p. 37]

In recent years there has been growing support
in some Israeli quarters for a government that is completely founded upon
Torah and Talmudic dictates. As Rabbi David Bar-Haim noted in 1988:

"We have before us a very clear proposition:
All human beings are equal,

Jews and Gentiles. As we shall now see,
this belief stands in total

contrast to the Torah of Moses, and is
derived from a total ignorance

of and assimilation of alien Western values.
It would not even merit

comment had not so many people been led
astray by it." [ELIEZER, p.

27]

Knesset member Meir Kahane also declared
in the 1980s that

"[Democracy] is based on the idea
that we are incapable of knowing

the truth. And since nobody holds the truth,
nobody can say what

is true. Therefore the majority has to
decide. It's a practical deduction.

Judaism is founded on the idea that we
know the truth ... You don't vote

on a truth ... Democracy and Judaism are
two opposite things. One

absolutely cannot confuse them ... These
are two totally opposite

conceptions of life." [AVRUCH, p. 134]

The above two speakers may be framed by
some as "extremists." Yet, "all Orthodox Jews," notes
Livnet Eliezer, "irrespective of their political convictions, believe
in the future establishment in Israel of a Halachic state [a state directed
by Jewish religious law], a Jewish theocracy. Though this state is expected
to respect certain democratic principles, its system of government would not
be democratic and would be founded on a totally different set of suppositions."
[ELIEZER, L., p. 290] "The situation
in Israel," adds Adam Garfinkle, "... is nearly the exact opposite
of the situation in the United States today. Here, toleration of diverse beliefs
and practices is accepted but public association with religion is not. In
Israel, public association with religion is accepted but toleration of diverse
belief and practice is not." [GARFINKLE, p. 135]

"When asked if the Arabs of Judea,
Samaria, and Gaza [the Occupied Territories] should be given the right to
vote in the event of [Israeli] annexation," notes Bernard Avishai, "only
31 percent of high school students said yes. Can this be unrelated to the
fact that there is no legal apparatus for an Arab to marry a Jew in Israel?
... Israeli schools have taught children more about the tribes of Israel than
about the Enlightenment [AVISHAI, B., p. 304] ... One poll by [newspaper]
Ha'aretz during 1984 revealed that 32 percent of Israelis felt violence
towards Arabs, even terrorism, was either 'totally' justified or had 'some'
justification. Over 60 percent of young Israelis believe that Arabs should
not be accorded full rights in the state." [AVISHAI, B., p. 307]

As Simha Flapan notes:

"There is no intrinsic connection between
Judaism and democracy. There always
was an orthodox, fundamentalist current in Judaism,
characterized by racial
prejudice toward non-Jews in general and Arabs
in particular. A substantial
portion -- perhaps even the overwhelming majority
--of the religious movements
[in Israel], and a growing part of the population
in general, came to conceive
of the West Bank not as the homeland of the
Palestinian people but as Judea
and Samaria, the birthplace of the Jewish faith
and homeland of the Jewish
people. Many people not only became indifferent
to the national rights of the
Palestinians living there, they did not even
see the necessity for granting them
civil rights." [original author's emphasis;
FLAPAN, S., 1987, p. 240]

"Universalism," notes Charles
Liebman and Steven Cohen, "a central component in the American Jewish
understanding of Judaism that extends to many Orthodox, is deliberately rejected
by mainstream Orthodoxy in Israel. The triumph of Jewish particularism is
evident with regards to relations between Jews and non-Jews." [LIEBMAN/COHEN,
p. 146] "Unfortunately,"
says Yehoshafat Harkabi, "in recent years, the xenophobia [in Israel]
has increased in intensity and extended to new areas. For some it is not merely
an attitude but also the basis for deriving general principles of conduct
-- including proposals for laws against non-Jews and against their residence
among Jews." [HARKABI, p. 160]

The growth in Israel (and America) of perspectives
like Meir Kahane are not tiny, nor are they aberrations. In 1988 a nakedly
racist and brutal bill that "would in effect decriminalize acts of violence
by Jews against Arabs" was introduced by nine Knesset members. [SEDAN,
G., 12-2-88, p. 10] It did not pass,
but what kind of "democracy" would America be considered if nine
United States senators felt secure enough to sponsor such a bill here,
a comparable one, say, that "decriminalizes white violence against
Blacks?" What would it mean to this country if such a
group of American congressmen could support such opinion openly, confidently,
and freely as members of elected government?

deported, 43% said they should remain with
no civil and political rights.

Only one out of ten [older Israelis] favored
deportation ... while three out

of
four
in the 18-22 age group supported this resolution." [JANSEN, p.

13]

According to a 2001 survey of Israelis by the
University of Haifa's center for national security research,

"A majority [71%] of Jews in Israel believe
that Arab citizens' complaints of
discrimination are unjustified, that Arabs excessively
influence politics
in the country [62%] and that Israeli Arabs
are to blame for tensions between
Jews and Arabs in the state [59%] ... More than
two-thirds (68%) of the Jewish
respondents said they do not want Arabs to live
in their neighborhoods."
[NIR, O., 12-12-01]

In 1985, Dr. Arik Carmon, chairman of Israel's
Committee on Education for Democracy, resigned, complaining that "the
demands voiced by ministers and Knesset members to release the Jewish terror
defendants [a group of Jews accused of terrorist acts against Arabs], the
violence by Jewish lawbreakers, which has accompanied this demand, and the
silence of political, spiritual, and social leaders in the light of this violence
have created the conditions for an anti-democratic climate which is beginning
to prevail in Israel." [JEWISH WEEK, 7-12-85, p. 5] That same year the Jewish Week noted
that the Israeli Defense Ministry "employs 58 civilian censors to scrutinize
mail of persons under security clearances. The public was largely unaware
of this until recent[ly]." [JEWISH WEEK, 7-26-85]

In a 1988 survey in Israel, notes sociologist
Smooha, "43% of Israeli Jews favored the denial of Arabs the right to
vote, ... 74% were unwilling to have an Arab as a superior in a job. Informal,
daily discriminations against Israeli Arabs abound." [SMOOHA, p. 329]
"There is a feeling that the state of Israel is the state of the
Jewish people," says Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen, "in the narrowest
meaning of the term, of which non-Jews are not really a part ... Israeli non-Jews
are not Israelis by natural right; they are something else, a something generally
left unspecified and unclear." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 79]
Reflecting the most ominous political undercurrents in the Jewish state,
in 1990 surveys by the Israeli Democracy Institute found that "over 55%
of the Israelis are willing to replace democracy with the rule of a 'strong
man.'" [SPRINZAK/DIAMOND, p. x]

"An overwhelming majority of Jews,"
says Sammy Smooha, "favor preferential, rather than equal, treatment
of Jews by the [Israeli] state." [SMOOHA] "In a 1980 survey, two-thirds
of Israeli Jews rejected equal treatment of Arabs in several areas, including
university admissions, employment, social security payments, and provision
of agricultural labor." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 79-80]

In 1965, says Israeli Jay Gonen, Kalman
Benyami, a psychology professor at Hebrew University, was so "shocked"
by the results of his research "that he decided not to publish them.
Benyami had discovered that the image of the Arab in the eyes of Israeli youth
was very distorted and negative. After the Six Day War [in 1967] he repeated
the study and found that Israeli youth viewed the Arab as even sicker, drunker,
uglier. At the same time he found an overestimation of self on the part of
the Israelis." [GONEN, J., p. 187] "Following the Yom Kippur War," says Zev Chafets, "army
psychologists were astonished at how many [Israeli] soldiers involved in the
first desperate days of fighting had imagined that the Syrian and Egyptian
armies were Nazis, bent on carrying out mass murder." [CHAFETS, p. 106]

In 1984, Israeli Uriel Tal wrote that "The
equality of humanity and civil rights is a foreign democratic principle [in
Israel] ... A denial of human rights[is] because our existence in Eretz Israel
is made conditional on the emigration of the Arabs from the country ... The
third issue of a non-Jewish person's human rights is based on the Biblical
commandment to annihilate the memory of Amalek, i.e., real genocide ... The
danger of this totality lies in the fact that it leads to a totalitarian concept
of the political realm because within its framework there is no room for the
existence of the human and civil rights of a non-Jew." [TAL, p. 59-65]

In 1967 Zev Chafets moved from America to
live in Israel. He recounts an early visit to Jerusalem: "As we lounged
in the shade talking, I idly peeled an orange, tossing the skin on the ground.
Suddenly, an enraged Arab shopkeeper emerged from his store and demanded that
I picked up the peels. At first I was embarrassed to have littered so thoughtlessly,
and I gathered up the refuse as he watched. Then, in a flash, it dawned on
me: This was my country,
my capital city. I tossed the peels back
on the street and told the shopkeeper to pick them up himself." [CHAFETS,
p. 15-16] (Chafets' self-described "Jewish guilt" led him to return
to apologize to the shopkeeper the next day).

In the late 1980s, Yoram Binur, a Jewish
Israeli, embarked on a project to learn what it was like to be an Arab in
Israel. Fluent in Arabic and with
a physical appearance that could be mistaken as that of an Arab, he began
an elaborate -- and dangerous -- deceit
to learn about Arabs' lives in the Jewish world of his homeland. The results
of his disturbing experiences were published as a book. He started out looking
for work from Jewish employers, standing early in the morning at a well-known
"slave corner" and secured a 16-hour a day job for kitchen work
that paid a total of $10 a day, with free food and a place to sleep (on a
mattress "one-third the length of a finger." [BINUR, p. 11] Despite a different self-choice for an Arabic
name, he was routinely, and disparagingly, called "Ahmed" or "Mohammed."

Binur's adventures led him to learn about
the rape of two Arab girls by Israeli soldiers ("Until then I hadn't
believed that members of the IDF [Israeli Defense Force] were capable of such
things; now one more naive belief was shattered." [BINUR, p. 29] and
to visit an Israeli officer training center where "I was able to witness
corruption among the higher ranks at close hand." [BINUR, p. 32] At a second job his Jewish boss goaded him
to change his name from an Arab to a Jewish one ("I was outraged. It
wasn't enough that the man was paying me starvation wages, and this his people
denied me the right to even aspire to freedom and independence. He also had
the effrontery to suggest that I give up the little that remained to me, that
I drop my name and assume the incongruous aspect of a Jew." [BINUR, p.
54] During this job a boss once noted
that, "I see our Arab is a little idle, so let him take out the glasses
and wash them over again." [BINUR, p. 68]

Among the most disturbing, humiliating experiences
Binur felt as an Arab was when one of his Jewish employers backed up next
to him with a lover as Binur was washing dishes in a cramped kitchen. "I
lowered my eyes," says Binur, "and concentrated on washing the dirty
dishes in the sink, so I wouldn't embarrass them with my presence ... Then
a sort of trembling came suddenly over me. I realized that they had not meant
to put on a peep show for my enjoyment. Those two were not the least bit concerned
with what I saw or felt even when they were practically fucking under my nose.
For them I simply didn't exist. I was invisible, a nonentity. It's difficult
to describe the feeling of extreme humiliation which I experienced. Looking
back, I think it was the most degrading moment I had during my entire posing
adventure." [BINUR, p. 69]

Binur was also roughed up by Jews (merely
for being perceived as an Arab) and was
warned
that a group of Jews were planning to attack him. [BINUR, p. 115-116] Eventually he found work
on a kibbutz, the legendary socialist communal work/living experiment famed
in pioneer Zionist folklore. Despite the fact that kibbutzim have a reputation
for openness and liberality, Binur found serious problems for him as an Arab
there too. "The kibbutzim," he wrote, "are probably the best
representation of the moderate left in Israel. With its liberal ideology which
stresses equal rights for all members of the human race and its high regard
for the dignity of labor ... I quickly learned that fear, suspicion, and prejudice
against Arabs existed no less around kibbutzniks than among other Israeli
Jews." [BINUR, p. 120] Here too he was warned by a friendly Jew that
others planned on beating him up one night with the intention of driving him
off the kibbutz. [BINUR, p. 134] Completely innocent, he was also accused
of theft. [See also David Grossman's account, in his The Yellow Wind,
of similar tales of chronic exploitation and Arab degradation at the hands
of Jewish employers].

(The anti-Arab racism in Israeli society
stretches to all corners of Jewish society. In 1989, a Bedouin man formally
converted to Judaism under prominent Orthodox Sephardic rabbi Ovadia Joseph.
The Arab had served in the Israeli army and moved with his Jewish wife to
a moshav --a [Jewish] agricultural settlement.
When his original identity became known, he was driven out by the Jewish community,
a community was not, by political standards, a "conservative" group;
83% of the moshav had voted for
the liberal Labor party in the last election. [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 25] )

Among Binur's conclusions after his experiences
posing as an Arab in Israel are that:

"[The Palestinian Arab] sees and recognizes
the value of freedom,

but is accorded the sort of treatment that
characterizes the most

backward dictatorial regimes. How can he
be anything but

frustrated?" [BINUR, p. 196]

"This book has sought to emphasize
how, on the level of day-to-

day interactions, Israeli Jews have exploited
and humiliated their

Arab neighbors." [BINUR, p. 198]

"The Palestinians, employed as a cheap
labor force, are forced into

the role of active observers with respect
to Israeli society, whereas

Israeli Jews don't even do that much and
are satisfied to rule without

exhibiting the least curiosity about how
the other side lives." [BINUR, p.

214]

These are long-standing perceptions in
the Jewish state. "As I grew up [in Haifa in the 1930s and 1940s],"
says Israeli Jay Gonen, "I took Arabs for granted. They were usually
called Esma, which is a distortion
of the Arab Isma, meaning 'Hear!
Hear!' ... In the late forties the term
Arabush
(plural Arabushim) became more popular.
A more demeaning term, it connotes the scorn that the efficient and strong
feel toward the weak and inept ... The Jewish conviction [was] that the Arabs
understand only the language of force, a bias that persisted for many years
and became especially pronounced after the Holocaust." [GONEN, J., p.
180]

Lesley Hazeleton was raised in Great Britain,
moved to Israel for over a decade, and had dual British-Israeli citizenry.
"The racism [in Israel]," she

wrote
in 1987,

"is as crude as anywhere in the world.
Sometimes it is familiar: 'I was

in the bank yesterday and this filthy old
Arab comes walking in with

a sack full of money. Cash. So where did
he get his hands on all that

money? What's he got to complain about?
He's making plenty out of

us.'" [HAZELETON, LESLEY, 1987, p.
106]

"[Israelis have] tolerance for government
secrecy and selected abridgement of human rights," notes Adam Garfinkle,
"Most Israelis accept it as natural that some things should not be made
public ... Also, most Israelis realize, and accept as necessary, that the
security services use physical and sometimes very harsh interrogative methods
against Arabs in the occupied territories who have been arrested for security
violations ... The general view is that the security of Israeli society, especially
when it comes to matters of life and death, overrides the individual rights
of Arab suspects." [GARFINKLE, p. 111]

In 1996 the Carmel Center for Social Research
released the results of a study conducted under sponsorship of the Israeli
Education Ministry. Over 35 percent "of Israeli youths said they hate
Arabs." Two-thirds of the high school students surveyed didn't believe
that Arabs should have equal rights in the Israeli state. [SEGAL, N., 11-27-96,
p. 12] In 1993, the Israeli Institute for Military Studies released the results
of a similar survey of 5,400 Israeli high school students. To the question,
"Do you hate Arabs?," 40 percent of the respondents answered yes
to either the choices "all" or "most" of them. [DERFNER,
L., 1-8-93, p. 8]

"I've seen and heard anti-Arab racism
so many times," wrote American immigrant to Israel Larry Derfner, "...
that I know it exists ... The bigotry quotient is ... much higher than the
nominal level I expected to find before moving here ... I've heard not only
countless right-wingers, but also Laborites and even a couple members of a
left-wing kibbutz utter variations on, 'The only good Arab is a dead Arab."
[DERFNER, L., 1-8-93, p. 8] The secretary,
Massi Raz, of Peace Now (the best known Israeli group advocating Israeli concessions
for peace with Arabs) noted the problem of "natural racism of almost all Israelis."
[ARNOLD, M., 1999, p. 72]

While serving in the Israeli army, Derfner
found himself watching the activities of a group of Israeli Border Patrolman
attack a number of waiting Arab taxi drivers in Gaza City. They smashed their
cars and "one policeman walked up to a driver seated in his cab, and
punched him in the face. Another policeman called over a young man sitting
at the bus stop, and swung open the door of his jeep into the fellow's face.
Three or four of the policemen ... took off after the departing taxis, throwing
their batons at them. When they came back to their jeep, they pounded each
other on the back, exulting like they'd just scored a goal in a soccer match.
The soldier guarding the base with me, an immigrant from Denmark, watched
the scene with his mouth literally hanging open, "They're like Nazis,"
he said. [DERFNER, L., 1-8-93, p. 8]

In the earlier years of modern Israel,
the eminent British historian Arnold Toynbee (who once was supportive of the
founding of a Jewish state in Palestine) wrote:

"In the German Nazis, an in the English
'Black-and-Tan,' I see the

detestable dark side of the countenance of
western civilization. I

myself am an involuntary participant, and
in the Jewish Zionists I

see disciples of the Nazis. The Jews are,
of course, not the only

persecuted people that have reacted to persecution
by doing as it

has been done by; and, of course, too, the
Jews who have reacted

in this tragically perverse way are only
one section of Jewry. Yet

the spectacle of the Jews, however few, following
in the Nazi

footsteps is enough to drive a sensitive
gentile or Jewish spectator

almost to despair. That any Jews should inflict
a third party some

of the very wrongs that Jews have suffered
at Western hands is a

portent that makes one wonder whether there
may not be something

irredeemably evil, not in Jewish human nature
in particular, nor

again just in Western human nature, but in
the human nature common

to all men." [TOYNBEE, A., in GOULD,
p 455]

In 1995, Hebrew University professor Moshe
Zimmerman found himself in trouble when he reportedly told an Israeli newspaper
that "there is a whole sector of Israeli society, that without hesitation
I would call a copy of the Nazis. Look at the [Jewish] children of Hebron.
They are exactly like Hitler Youth. They are brainwashed from age zero that
Arabs are bad and about anti-Semitism, making them paranoid and racist --
just like the Hitler Youth." "Zimmerman," wrote the Jewish
Telegraphic Agency, "said that his remarks had been misquoted and,
in one case, fabricated. But he did not withdraw his opinion that some similarities
exist between Nazi hate propaganda and the ways [Jewish] settlers indoctrinate
their children to hate Arabs." [SEGAL, N., 5-7-95, p. 7]

Zimmerman was probably referring to the likes
of studies at Israeli high schools after the 1994 murder of nearly 30 Muslims
at prayer by American-born doctor Baruch Goldstein. Many students supported
the random slaughter (as high as 60% of one Jewish high school class in the
southern Israeli city of Be'er Sheva). As Joe Kolodner, head of the Psychological
Services department for Israeli public schools noted, "It worries me
that young people here are growing up without being able to emphasize with
the pain of others and identify with their suffering ... We must undergo a
soul-searching. We've failed to develop values and create a humanistic society."
[DERFNER, L., 4-1-94, p. 2]

Journalist Lesley Hazelton, living in Jerusalem,
noted in 1984 a conversation she had with an anonymous Israeli newspaper editor.
"I've been in this country for fifty years," he told her,

"and in all that fifty years, I have
never, been so saddened and so

concerned about the state of the country
and its future. It's like 1984

After fifty one years of Israeli statehood,
only in September 1999 did the Israeli Supreme Court formally ban the use
of torture by the government's security departments during interrogations
of (Arab) detainees. (Somehow twisting
half a century of behind-closed-doors brutality into an expression of Jewish
moral superiority, Jewish American newspaper columnist Anthony Lewis wrote
that the Supreme Court decision "has turned Israel toward the role that
... early Zionists saw for a Jewish state: to be a light unto other nations)."
[LEWIS, A., 9-15-99, p. B3] Amnesty International was among those who appealed
to the Court to forbid the violent shaking of prisoners, multi-day periods
of sleep deprivation, forcing victims into difficult postures and oppressive
environments for extended periods of time, extreme weather exposure, and other
inhumane assaults. "Israel," declared the group, "is the only
country in the world to have effectively legalized torture by authorizing
interrogators to use these methods." [DEUTSCHE PRESSE-AGENTUR, 1-12-99]
The Israeli human rights organization Betselem noted that 85 percent of the
1,000-1,500 Arabs detained by Shin Bet [the Israeli FBI] each year have been
tortured. [TORONTO STAR, 5-21-98, p. A6]
In 1998, an Arab-American citizen, Hashem Mufleh, was detained and
tortured while traveling in the West Bank. The U.S. State Department had even
posted a warning against Arab-Americans visiting that area. [DEUTSCHE PRESSE-AGENTUR,
11-9-98] Earlier, three other Arab-Americans
(Anwar Mohamed, Yousif Marel, and Bashir Saidi) were detained, imprisoned
and -- according to their depositions -- tortured. Saidi was imprisoned for
18 months, Mohamed for 40 days; all were eventually released to return to
America. [BRISCOE, D., 8-26-99] The same year, an American born teenager,
Hashem Mufleh, faced similar treatment, and a trial, after being accused of
associating with the Islamic militant Hamas organization in the Occupied Territories.
[KRAFT, D., 11-18-98] In 1999, human rights organizations charged that ten
Arab prisoners have been killed while being interrogated over the past decade
at Israeli prisons. [DEUTSCHE PRESSE-AGENTUR, 1-13-99] In 1980, during a prisoner
hunger strike for better conditions, two jailed Arabs were essentially tortured
and killed when, in a showdown of wills, their Israeli wardens attempted to
force milk into their stomachs, instead flooding their lungs. By now torturously
and terminally ill, they were not taken to a hospital until the next day.
[GROSSMAN, D., 1990, p. 88] In Lebanon, the Israeli-trained Khiyam prison
directors of the South Lebanon Army also tortures detainees. In September
1999 Israeli Major General Dan Halutz told an Israeli court that Shin Bet
teaches those who run the Khiyam facility. [DEUTSCHE PRESSE-AGENTUR, 9-28-99]

The insertion of the modern Jewish nation
of Israel and its oppressive policies into the heart of Arab lands has created
a whole new dimension, and a new population of adherents, to the long tradition
of "anti-Semitism." Whereas for centuries the Jewish people in their
ghettos disdained the Christian faith and its people, with the creation of
a militant, garrisoned, exclusionist ghetto in what was once Palestine, they
have now solicited yet another antagonist front: the outrage and hatred from
Islam and its many millions of believers. "The Palestinian problem,"
notes Jewish professor Maxime Rodinson, "created by Zionism and compounded
by its logical triumph, has spread hatred of Jews into Arab countries where
anti-Semitism was virtually unknown. The Zionists have very actively aided
this with their incessant propaganda to persuade people that Zionism, Judaism,
and Jewishness are equivalent concepts." [RODINSON, p. 112] "No enemy of the Jewish people, throughout
history," said another Jewish scholar, Leonard Fein, "has had so
powerful an argument or so plausible a position as the Arabs, and ... Arab
passions, at long last, are now coming to be seen as authentic, no less authentic
than the Jews." [FEIN, Israel, p. 8-9] "Many of the peoples of the world who
have developed antagonism or suspicion about the Jewish people have no historical
legacy of antagonism towards us," argues Michael Lerner. "In the
years since the second World War they have come to know us primarily through
the activities of the state which calls itself the state of the Jewish people."
[LERNER, M., Goyim, p. 431]

Yet another group of the exploited under
the racist norms of Israeli society are the so-called "foreign workers."
For decades, poorly paid and defenseless Arabs from the Occupied Territories
(and Israel) have served as cheap labor sources for Jewish society. While
the average per capita income in Israel is $16,000 a year, thanks to over
$3 billion a year in U.S. aid to the Jewish state, the official "minimum
wage" for foreign workers is
about $3.50 an hour, although many are paid less. With increasing violent
acts from Arabs against Jewish citizens in recent years, Palestinian labor
was viewed as a security risk. Hence, in the mid-1990s, Arab labor for the
Occupied Territories was drastically curtailed (in Gaza, employment rose to
60% of those desiring work), and cheap laborers from distant lands (particularly
from Romania, the Philippines, and Thailand, but also South and West Africa,
Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Ukraine, and other places) were permitted to come
to Israel to do the tasks for low pay that the Jewish strata is not interested
in doing. And they usually have few, if any, benefits and rights in Israeli
society: there is no overtime pay, for example, sick leave or paid holidays.
[TROUNSON, R., 3-8-1997, p. 16] By 1998, there were such 190,000 foreign workers
living in Israel; less than half had legal work permits and Jewish public
opinion was increasingly hostile to them. Foreign workers were blamed for
"spreading disease, drug use, alcoholism, prostitution and violence." Israeli police, however, note that "most
foreign workers 'respect the law' and many, particularly those here illegally,
are victimized in thefts and rapes." [AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE, 7-9-1998]
A 1999 survey noted that only 35% of those Israelis polled said "they
would agree to have workers live near them." [FISHBEIN, 12-23-1999]

In 1998 the Romanian prime minister, Radu
Vasile, and nine cabinet ministers journeyed to Israel. Estimates of Romanians
working in Israel legally were about 30,000, illegally tens of thousands more.
Among issues to be discussed with the Jewish government was "the treatment
Romanian workers receive in Israel. Romania has repeatedly protested that
its nationals working in Israel are harassed by police and humiliated and
exploited by employers." [DEUTSCHE PRESSE-AGENTUR, 6-28-1998] The month before, the Ambassadors from Romania,
Ghana and Nigeria complained about mistreatment of their citizens including
"street arrests and harassment, non-payment of wages, appalling living
conditions and lack of social rights" and employers' refusal to return
passports to workers who wished to leave the country. [DEUTSCHE PRESSE-AGENTUR,
6-24-1998] In 1998, the Israeli government even ordered that, because of a shortage,
gas masks and chemical protection kits (in case of chemical attack from Iraq)
could not be sold to foreigners. [WALKER, C., 2-7-1998]

In 1999, Thailand's ambassador to Israel, Domedeg
Bunnag, complained that "if the workers' conditions were not improved,
his government would no longer permit Israel to import Thai workers."
"I am almost moved to tears when I see the conditions of Thai workers
in Israel," he told an Israeli newspaper, "They live in sub-human
condtions, and are constantly exploited by both the moshav [agricultural center]
owners and the manpower agencies." Bunnag also charged that Thai workers
were faced with unhealthy working condition, were overcharged for rent, underpaid,
and routinely cheated by Israeli employers. [BAR-MOHA, Y., 7-19-99]

Foreign workers coming to Israel are legally
bound to their initial sponsoring employer, no matter what unjust, inhumane
or exploitive conditions are thrust upon them. "This requirement of linking
the [worker's] visa to one employer creates tremendous potential for abuse
and exploitation," notes Hanna Zohar, founder of a worker aid organization.
[FINANCIAL TIMES, 1-23-97, p. 4] "Israelis
lately," noted the LosAngeles Times, "have become
uncomfortably aware of the inhumane living and working conditions forced on
many of the workers by their Israeli employers ... Some employers take away
the workers' passports and, toward the end of one-year or six-month contracts,
have them deported without paying their final wages. Confiscating passports
is illegal but common, workers advocates say." [TROUNSON, R., 3-8-97,
p. A16]

In September 1997 an international news
report noted that "Israel's foreign ministry pledged Thursday to ensure
'humane treatment' of foreign workers after a Romanian laborer died at a Tel
Aviv construction site from a lack of medical attention." Such workers
are often required to work 12-13 hours a day. [AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE, 9-2-1997] "We came here to make money and support
our families so our children have a chance for a better future," one
Romanian worker told a Los Angeles Times reporter, "But they treat
us like animals." [TROUNSON, R., 3-8-1997, p. A16]

Jewish racism in Israel also impacts the "Black
Hebrews," the African-American community of immigrants (who are rejected
as Jews) in the desert town of Dimona. In 1999, the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz
noted that the Dimona municipality and the Ministry of Religious Affairs continued
to block the Black Hebrews' attempts to get land for a cemetery. They have
been forced to bury their dead in the local garbage dump. [ARBELI, 10-3-99]

Jewish racism in Israel does not screech
to a stop at the wall between goyim
and the Jewish people. Although anti-Gentile racism in Israel cannot be reasonably
compared to the intra-Jewish dimensions of the problem, it very much exists
within the Jewish community too.
Israel has always had a discriminatory society. The Ashkenazim -- Jews of
European heritage -- largely founded, and still run, the country. (In its
early years, Zionism's strongest hold among Jews was in Russia and Poland,
and these people essentially founded the modern Jewish state). Later mass
immigration to Israel included the Sephardim ("Oriental" Jews from
Arab countries, Iran, India, et al). By 1992, Israel's Jews consisted of about
half Ashkenazi and half Sephardi, although over 90% of the rest of the Jews
of the world -- including those in America -- were Ashkenazi.

Tainted by Arabic cultures, the Sephardim
have never measured up to traditional western Jewish self-identity. "The
great Hebrew poet Chaim Nachmann Bialik," says Zev Chafets, "was
supposed to have jested that he hated Arabs because they reminded him of Sephardic
Jews." [CHAFETS, Z., p. 118] "Israeli identity of immigrants,"
says Yohan Peres, "is constructed on the perceived Ashkenazic identity."
[AYALA, E., p. 155] "Israel's
first prime minister (and Ashkenazi) David Ben Gurion remarked in 1960 that
the Sephardim in Israel had "come from a society that was backward, corrupt,
uneducated, and lacking in independence and self-respect" and they should
seek to attain "the superior moral and intellectual characteristic of
those who created the state." [BEN GURION, in SELZER, p. 65]
A journalist in one of the major Israeli dailies, Ha'aretz,
once wrote that the Sephardim were "the likes of which we have not yet
known in this country. You will find among them dirty card games for money,
drunkenness, and fornication. Many of these suffer from serious eye, skin,
and venereal disease; not to mention immorality and stealing." [SELZER,
p. 69]

In his study of the Israeli kibbutz system,
Melford Spiro noted that at the schools "immigrant [Sephardim] children
bear the brunt of this out-group aggression. Many students, ideologically
in favor of immigration, are hostile to the immigrants from the Middle East,
whom they view as inferiors -- they call them
schnorim, the 'black ones.' They are the constant butts of verbal
aggression, taunting, and teasing." [SPIRO, p. 319]

In more recent years, Zev Chafets notes
the time he witnessed the stir created by an Israeli Ashkenazi journalist
at an American Jewish Committee conference in New York. As Chafets recalls,
the woman proclaimed that the Sephardim in Israel

"are brutal, vulgar people, people
who have introduced violence

and intolerance. I hate their values,
their attitudes. They have destroyed

our [Israeli] dream. They've stolen my
homeland and I feel like a

stranger in my own country."

"There was a shocked silence in the
audience," says Chafets, "I had heard this kind of diatribe a dozen
times in Israel but it was a new experience for the American Jews. More than
a few of them, I guessed, were remembering similar statements expressed about
themselves only a generation ago by America's bluebloods." [CHAFETS,
Z., p. 129-130]

In 1998 the BBC reported the controversial
accusations of Knesset [Israeli Parliament] Member Ori Or: "Among other
things, Or told the [Israeli] newspaper that it was impossible to hold a normal
conversation with Oriental Jews, adding that they were not really Israeli.
He called the Moroccan Jewish community the biggest and the most problematic
group in Israel ... Or accused Oriental Jews of portraying themselves as victims
of exploitation." [BBC, 7-31-98]

"With inadequate living space, schools,
day-care centers, kindergartens, youth clubs, and cultural programs,"
said Etan Levine by the 1990s, "it is small wonder that [Jewish] Moroccans
account for 90% of Israel's prison population. And this is a community that
in its native land was far from a criminal element. Crime was learned in Israel
itself ... There is real hostility in the Sephardic community today. The Ashkenazim
are identified as responsible for every injustice -- real or imagined -- that
the Sephardim suffered since arriving in Israel. This resentment has been
expressed in Sephardic voting patterns, in violent demonstrations, and in
a host of other less bellicose ways." [LEVINE, E., p. 41, 42]

By 1990, 56% of Ashkenazim Jews born in
Israel had a college education; comparably, only 16.5% of the Sephardim born
in Israel had such schooling. [SMOOHA, S., Jewish, p. 162] "The most crucial material gulf between
the two ethnic groups," observed Israeli sociologist Sammy Smooha in
1992,

"lies in the quantity and accumulation
of wealth ... In the Jewish

population the poor and working class are
predominantly Oriental,

the middle stratum is ethnically mixed
with some Ashkenazi over-

representation and the upper-middle class
and elite are predominantly

Ashkenazi ... The mobility of Ashkenazim
was ... to a large extent

predicated on the channeling of Oriental
newcomers to the lower

rungs of society ... Ashkenazim still continue
to stereotype themselves

as superior westerners and to project Orientals
as inferior, arabized

Middle Easterners." [SMOOHA, S., Jewish,
p. 163, 164, 165, 168]

The Sephardim also represent a Jewish tradition
of ghettoization even within the Jewish state. "It is clear," wrote
Shlomo Swirski, "that the majority of Orientals now live in neighborhoods,
towns, and villages that are overwhelmingly Oriental." [AYALA, E., p.
154]

For decades there have even been accusations
that, in the early years of the new Israeli nation, Jewish Ashkenazim stole
Sephardim children to sell to other Jews or raise as their own. Such wild
stories had never been taken seriously by Israeli mainstream society until
1997, when it was biologically proven that a Jewish woman in California, Tzila
Levine, was the daughter of an emigrant to Israel from Yemen. They were separated
-- and didn't know for certain of each other -- for nearly fifty years. Mother
and daughter, noted the Los Angeles Times,

"asked searching questions about why
the state of Israel, in its

early days, and in the years since, had
all but dismissed the claims

of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of immigrants
that their babies

had disappeared ... Leaders of the Yemenite
Jewish community

here and in the United States have long
suspected that the missing

children did not die, as many parents were
told, but were kidnapped

and sold to childless Jewish couples of
American and European

descent ... Most Israelis have long dismissed
the stories as the

fantasies of an undereducated group caught
up in the chaos of

mass immigration ... The sensational case,
which sparked hundreds

of phone calls to radio talk shows, is
expected to spur new demands

for investigations into the decades-old
claims and to intensify simmering

racial tensions between Sephardic Jews,
of Middle Eastern and North

African origin, and Ashkenazim." [TROUNSON,
R., p. A6]

Of course the Sephardim are Jews, and despite
Ashkenazi discrimination towards them, they ride securely above an entire
class of people yet beneath them. "Sephardim Jews," says Amnon Rubenstein,
"have also benefited since 1967 by the Palestinians to the West Bank
and Gaza Strip taking the lowest manual work within Israeli society, allowing
the Sephardim to move up a step on the socio-economic ladder." [RUBENSTEIN,
A., p. 61]

Yet another (very recent) level of Jewish
underclass in Israel is the Ethiopians. In the 1980s and early 1990s the Israeli
government began airlifting the Falasha (Blacks from Ethiopia who have a Jewish
self-identity) to Israel. This was part of Israel's standard "absorption"
policy -- using also large numbers of immigrant Jews from Russia, and others
-- to swell Jewish ranks in a country where the minority Arab birth rate is
considerably larger. The "Jewish" link legislated by the state of
Israel between Ethiopians and Russians, however, is peculiar. Russian and Ethiopian Jews are
in no way similar: their "race," their language, their culture,
and their religion are all drastically dissimilar.
(Russian Jews, for example, raised
under communism, have become largely atheist and exemplify the mores of western
civilization; Ethiopians practice some religious rituals that are unknown
otherwise in Israel and are, upon arrival to Israel, emphatically Third World
in worldview). All that binds the
two groups together are the ancient legends and religious convictions about
the "seed" of Abraham-Isaac-Jacob, a "lost tribe" of Jews,
and its legendary addenda. As Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen note, "the
myth of common ancestry implies both common biological traits and a common
history (it matters not whether the myth is true, only that those who share
the same culture believe it to be true)." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 13] Ironically,
much of the Ethiopians' traditional Third World culture is closer akin to
the indigenous Muslim Arab Bedouin (some too, who are of African origin) of
the Jewish state. The influx of a Third World psychological temperament was
also in marked difference from the predominant Israeli machismo; "Several
Israeli newspaper commentators," says Adam Garfinkel, "have remarked
that the gentility of the Ethiopians is a welcome antidote to the brashness
and hard-edgedness of Israeli culture." [GARFINKEL, A., p. 102]

Allowing Black Jewish Ethiopians to migrate
to Israel also has some international political expediency, in particular
public image-making, i.e., helping to diffuse the 1975 United Nations General
Assembly resolution (repealed under heavy Jewish lobbying pressure by 1992)
that "Zionism is racism." "The predominant interest in putting
the spotlight on the Falashas and keeping it there," says Virginia Dominguez,
a non-Jewish scholar in Israel, "seems to have come from certain sectors
in the American Jewish community. [DOMINGUEZ, V., p. 73]

Ethiopians as Jews has long been a controversial
issue. Only in the mid-1970s did Israel's Sephardic Chief Rabbi Ovadia Josef
finally proclaim them officially to be real Jews. In the late 1970s Ethiopian
males who made it to Israel were forced to surrender blood from their male
organs in a circumcision ritual, a little understood expression of rabbinate
doubts about, and an impugning of, their own Jewish identity. Other Jewish
immigrants to Israel have met similar affronts about their identity. Virginia
Dominguez cites the case of Jewish immigrants from India: "Members of
the Bene Israel community who moved to Israel after the establishment of the
state in 1948 found that most rabbis in Israel questioned their Jewishness
and that they were not allowed to marry non-Bene Israel Jews without first
undergoing at least nominal rituals in conversion to Judaism." [DOMINGUEZ,
p. 176]

The Ethiopian Jews in Israel have, of course,
discovered at first hand the nature of enduring Jewish racism. In an Ashkenazi-Sephardim-Ethiopian
Jewish hierarchy, the blacks find themselves at the bottom of Jewish society
(although above Arabs). Among the most publicized Ethiopian protests about
racist treatment occurred when Ethiopian-donated blood (a word which has connotations
to the word "soul" in their Amharic language) was dumped by the
Israeli health establishment in 1996 for fear of AIDS contamination. 10,000
Ethiopians rioted in outrage near the Prime Minister's Office in Israel; scores
of police and demonstrators were injured.

In Israeli society, even recent Russian
immigrants are discriminated against. Their Jewishness is often held suspect
(anywhere between 5-30% of them are accused of being non-Jews. In 1990 the
head of the Ministry of Absorption declared that as many as 30% were not Jewish,
while at the same time the Israeli Interior Ministry cited a 5% figure). [FRANKEL,
p. 176] Those suspected of not-being Jewish must face traditional Jewish animosity
towards them as "goyim." As the Israeli newsapper Haaretz
noted about the situation, concerning two parents who lost a daughter to a
Palestinian "suicide bomber":

"In addition to beign immigrants from Russia
[Tatiano and Viktor Madbaneko's
Jewishness is 'in doubt' and they are forced
into hopeless shadowboxing with
a society that is practiced in 'hating gentiles.'
They so much want to find a way
to the heart of this society, with all its prejudices."
[USHPIZ, A., 2001, 6-8-01]

Most Russian Jewish were atheists under communist
rule and few followed traditional Jewish religious dictates. Over 30,000 Russian-born
men have been ritually circumcised in Israel. Glenn Frankel notes the case
of an Israeli rabbi who "ordered a circumcision performed on the corpse
of a Russian immigrant killed in a traffic accident before the rabbi would
allow it to be buried in a Jewish grave. Later it turned out that hundreds
of other corpses had been similarly mutilated at cemeteries throughout the
country." [FRANKEL, p. 168]

The Russians are a very educated community.
By 1990 more than half of all immigrants from the Soviet Union to Israel had
university degrees, a fifth had at least two degrees. [KYLE, p. 236]
Reflecting serious problems in assimilating into Israeli society, "the
Russians," noted Yoram Peri, editor of the Israeli daily newspaper Davar,
"say the Israelis treat their men as mafia and their women as prostitutes."
[FRIEDLAND, E., 6-29-95, p. 10] Russian
immigrants to Israel are widely perceived to be a criminal element, particularly
promoting prostitution. "Russian
women," notes Glenn Frankel, "with the light colored skin and blonde
hair were known to locals as 'white meat.'" [FRANKEL, G., p. 174]

In 1977, two Soviet Jews in Vienna, claiming
to represent 700 others, held a news conference decrying "Zionist propaganda"
that enticed them to move to Israel; they wanted to return to Russia. [ASSOCIATED
PRESS, 4-28-77] In 1991 the Netherlands
denied political refugee status to 50 Russian Jews who had fled Israel, unhappy
with conditions in the Jewish state. Another 230 Russian Jews in the same
situation were expected to be deported soon after from Germany. [TASS, 12-17-91]
"In August 1995 the Federal Court of Canada upheld an immigrant
panel's denial of asylum to Russian émigrés who had left Israel were they
had been citizens, claiming harassment and persecution. Israel was troubled
that Canada had even considered such a claim concerning the nature of Israeli
society." [SINGER/SELDIN, 1997, p. 247]
By 1993, 5-10% of Russian immigrants to Israel were disillusioned enough
to go back to the country of their birth. A 1993 survey of 1,200 Russians
revealed that 75% considered their economic situation to be worse in Israel
than Russia. [FRANKEL, p. 183]

So what holds all these disparate Jews in
Israel together, despite the serious strife, animosity, huge social and cultural
differences, and conflict between them? The ancient theme, configured as government
policy -- the bond that has held Jewry tightly together in its ghettoes throughout
history. The perceived threat of non-Jews.

*****************************

Terrorism these days is generally defined
as the random murder or harassment of the innocent towards a political goal;
most agree that terrorist acts are cowardly deeds of violent desperation.
In modern western society, the best known terrorists are those of Islamic
and/or Arab origin, usually rooted
in reaction to political conditions in the Middle East, particularly regarding
Israel. The accusation of "terrorism" is, of course, a very relative
term. It is an old adage that one
person's "terrorist" is another's "freedom fighter." Israelis
are routinely spared the accusation of terrorism today despite the fact Israeli
history has included brutally random violent activities. Menachem Begin, for
instance, became the prime minister of Israel in 1977. In his younger years
the British labeled him a terrorist for his leadership role in the underground
IRGUN organization and its attacks against the British and Arabs in then-British
controlled Palestine.

Begun took the heal of IRGUN in 1943. "Israel
was," wrote William Zukerman, "in part at least, a child of an underground
terrorist movement -- the Irgun Zvai Leumi (now named the Herut Party) which
conducted one of the most ruthless terrorist campaigns against the British
Mandate government." [ZUKERMAN, W., p. 163] Under Begin, IRGUN membership
numbered 50,000 Jews; "they carried out operations resulting in the death
of some 300 British personnel."

In 1946 Begin's IRGUN group bombed the King
David Hotel in Jerusalem, randomly killing 82 people, including 17 Jews. The
British executed three captured IRGUN terrorists accused of the crime a week
later. Begin responded by hanging
two randomly captured British sergeants in retaliation. [AVISHAI, B., p. 174]
"We're guilty of nothing," said Clifford Martin, as his murderers
wrapped a kerchief over his eyes. His swinging body was even booby-trapped
and hung upside down with the other to maim or kill those who came to cut
it down. [HABER, E., p. 188; HERSH, S., p. 259]
Begin later made his first visit to England in 1972. "Members
of the families of the two sergeants," notes Eitan Haber, "staged
demonstrations against him. The communications media asked uncomfortable questions
and got the by now well-known response: 'I understand too well the feelings
of the two families, but what choice did we have? We were in the midst of
a war for our liberation." [HABER, E., p. 190]

"Individual IRGUN units," notes
Jewish historian Walter Laquer, "in response to the killing of Jews,
began to attack Arabs passing through Jewish quarters. There was also indiscriminate
bomb throwing in Arab markets and at bus stations." [LAQUER, p. 375]

In 1964 Begin responded to those who called
him a terrorist:

"Our enemies called us terrorists ... People who were neither
our friends

nor our enemies ... also used this Latin
name ... [The British] called us

'terrorists' to the end ... And yet, we
were not terrorists ... The historical

and linguistic origins of the political
term 'terror' prove that it cannot be

applied to a revolutionary war of liberation
... Fighters for freedom must

arm; otherwise they would be crushed overnight
... What has a struggle

for the dignity of man, against oppression
and subjugation, to do with

'terrorism?'" [BEGIN, p. 59-60]

Noble words of a Jewish freedom fighter,
but this exact text could of course be equally wielded as a justification
to defend the Palestinian peoples' own "war of liberation" for the
"dignity of man, against oppression and subjugation" against the
modern state of Israel. In the 1930s and 1940s, during Jewish efforts to throw
the British out of Palestine, before Jews became much publicized as innocent
victims of random Palestinian attacks, the nomer of "terrorist" was not so completely negatively charged.
Later books exploring Jewish terrorism in Palestine (without complete condemnation)
include the likes of The Lady was a Terrorist (1953), Woman of Violence:
Memoirs of a Young Terrorist (1966), Memoirs of an Assassin (1966),
and Terror Out of Zion (1977).
In 1996 convicted Jewish terrorist Era Rapaport's justification of his murderous
deeds (Letters From Tel Mond Prison. An Israel Settler Defends His Act
of Terror) won the National Jewish Book Award. (Can we imagine such a
justification of the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center winning
a National Muslim Book Award?) The charge of terrorism, and its meaning,
in the Israeli-Palestinian context, is, it appears, entirely relative to who
is talking. Menachem Begin once called Palestinian guerillas -- his liberation-oriented
mirror image -- "two-legged animals." [JANSEN, M., p. 15]

We hear alot about "terrorists in Palestine"
these days, but, apparently, when these terrorists were Jews -- not Arabs
-- it was cool. Ben Hecht was a successful Hollywood screenwriter. And Irgun
activist. Here's what he says about a newspaper ad he wrote for that terrorist
group:

"The ad carried the headline: 'Letter to the
Terrorists of Palestine.' It read:
'My Brave Friends. You may not believe what
I write you, for there is a lot
of fertilizer in the air at the moment. But
on my word as an old reporter,
what I write is true. The Jews of America are
for you. You are their champions.
You are the grin they wear. You are the feather
in their hats. You are the first
answer that makes sense -- to the New World.
Every time you blow up a
British arsenal, or wreck a British jail, or
send a British railroad sky high,
or rob a British bank, or let go with your
guns and bombs at the British
betrayers and invaders of your homeland, the
Jews of America make a
little holiday in their hearts ..." [HECHT,
B., 1985, p. 615]

"The ad," continues Hechct, "appeared
in a few days. Some fifteen newspapers printed it at their 'usual advertising
rates.' Hundreds of other newspapers in the U.S., Mexico, South America and
France ran the ad gratis. It appealed to them, apparently, as news." [HECHT,
B., 1985, p. 617]

From the position of today's empowered
Israeli state, another eventual prime minister of Israel, Benyamin Netanyahu,
offered an official definition of terrorism created by an Israeli-sponsored
conference in Jerusalem in 1979: "Terrorism is the deliberate and systematic
murder, maiming and menacing of the innocent people to inspire fear for political
ends." [NETANYAHU, p. 9] In 1986 Netanyahu edited an entire volume about
containing terrorism against Israel and the West, (none of the volume's 41
authors mentions Jewish-inspired terrorism) saying, "For the terrorist
... legitimacy is derived from whatever cause he is fighting for or professes
to be fighting for. There is no need to ask the people. He, the terrorist,
is the self-appointed arbiter of what is just and necessary." [NETANYAHU,
p. 5] Although Netanyahu didn't have
Menachem Begin and the founding of Israel itself in mind, Begin even argued,
in justifying his own terrorism, that
any kind of resistance to oppressive political
authority must ultimately result in violence: "All civil disobedience,
if it has serious purpose, must inevitably, by iron laws of events, bring
on an armed uprising." [BEGIN, p. 198]

Another such Jewish terrorist/freedom fighter
who rose to become the Israeli foreign minister and later prime minister (succeeding
Begin in 1983) was Yitzhak Shamir. Among other accomplishments, Shamir headed
a group of underground Jewish terrorists (LEHI) who assassinated a United
Nations peace representative in 1948, Count Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish diplomat.
[COCKBURN, A.; L., p. 35] As the prime minister of Israel, says Glenn
Frankel, "he would cut any corner, shade any truth, anger any friend,
defy any foe, to secure the land of Israel." [FRANKEL, G., p. 286] The
founder of LEHI (also known as the "Stern Gang") was Abraham Stern.

In 1944 the Stern gang also assassinated
Walter Guinness (Lord Moyne) in Cairo, Egypt. Guinness, "was, nominally
at least, the key figure in British policy in the Middle East" and "the
only British minister to have been assassinated in this century." Two
Jewish murderers were captured -- Eliahu Hakim and Eliahu Bet-Tzuri. "Our
deed," the two declared before the were hung, "stemmed from motives
and our motives stemmed from our ideals. And if we prove our ideals were right
and just, then our deed was right and just." A third Stern gang member,
Raphael Sadovsky, involved in the Guinness murder, was later captured and
his "50-page confession ... includes names, dates and places and led
to the wholesale arrests of suspected Sternists in Egypt and Palestine."
[BLACK, I., 11-5-94, p. T39]

In 1963, Jewish author Gerald Frank heroized
the Guinness terrorist act in a volume called The Deed. "When
The Deed was published," notes Ian Black, "the New York
Times wrote an editorial condemning it as a glorification of terrorism."
In 1975, continues Black,

"the Israeli government ... negotiated
with the Egyptian government,

via [Jewish American Secretary of State]
Henry Kissinger, to allow

the bodies of the two Eliahus to be exhumed
and brought to Jerusalem,

where they were reburied with full military
honors." [BLACK, I., 11-5-94]

... James Callaghan, then [British] Foreign
Secretary, ordered a formal

protest 'to make it clear to the Israeli
government that an act of terrorism

should not be honored this way' ... Under
the premiership of the former

Irgun chief, Menachem Begin, postage stamps
were issued honouring

the two Eliahus and guaranteeing them an
honoured place in the

martyrology of the 'fighting family.'"
[BLACK, I., 11-5-94]

In another well-documented, and larger scale,
atrocity, on April 9, 1948, members of terrorist IRGUN and LEHI squads murdered
two-thirds of the inhabitants of the Arab village of Deir Yassin. In 1953
Israeli general Ariel Sharon headed a group of soldiers who murdered 70 Jordanians
in the border village of Kibiya. "A statement was issued," notes
Seymour Hersh, "in [prime minister] Ben Gurion's name blaming the atrocity
on the inhabitants of nearby Jewish border settlements." [HERSH, S.,
p. 78]

In more recent times, in October of 1985
Israeli jets bombed targets in the sovereign nation of Tunis, killing at least
12 Tunisians and 60 Palestinians. "This too was an act of terrorism,"
argues Israeli Amnon Rubenstein, "for its intent was not only to assassinate
Yassir Arafat and retaliate for the killing of three Israelis in Cyprus, but
to promote a sense of fear and intimidation among all Palestinians. In short,
none of the parties to the current [Arab-Jewish] conflict has a monopoly on
the use of terror." [RUBENSTEIN, A., p. 156-159]

Israeli Gideon
Levy also noted, in the midst of the slaying of hundreds of Palestinians in
the 2000-2001 Intifada against Jewish occupation:

"Who's a terrorist? Aida Fatahia was walking
down the street. Ubei Daraj was
playing in the yard. She was the mother of three;
he was nine years old. Both
were killed last week by Israel Defense Forces
(IDF) bullets, for no reason.
Their killing raises once again, in all its
horror, the question of whether
Palestinian violence is the only violence that
should be called terrorism.
Is only car bombing terrorism, while shooting
at a woman and child is
not? Is only car bombing terrorism, while shooting
at a woman and child
is not? Fatahia and Daraj join a long list of
men, women, and children
who were innocent of wrongdoing and killed in
the past five months by
the IDF. In the Israeli debate, their deaths
were not a result of 'terror
actions' or 'terrorist attacks' and the killers
are not 'terrorists.' Those
are terms used only for Palestinian violence
... IDF Chief of Staff
Shaul Mofaz, commander of an army that has killed
almost 90
children in the last five months, calls the
Palestinian Authority (PA)
a 'terrorist entity,' and totally ignores the
actions of the army --
and the results of those actions. But the questions
must be asked:
Aren't massive land expropriations, systematic
house destructions,
the uprooting of orchards and groves, also a
form of violence?
Isn't cutting off entire towns and villages
from their source of
water a type of violence?" [LEVY, G., 3-11-01]

In a later 1960s Israeli government-sponsored
terrorist act against the United States government, Jewish critic Daniel Bell
notes the case of the notorious "Lavon Affair":

"The Lavon Affair is a striking instance.
Some years ago, Israeli

intelligence agents in Cairo set fire to
a United States Information

Agency building, in order to blame the Egyptians
for the act and

arouse anti-Nasser [then the head of Egypt]
sentiment in the United

States. When the plot miscarried, members
of the Israeli service

forged papers to demonstrate that Pinchas
Lavon, then Minister

of Defense, had approved the action. Lavon
was then forced to

resign ... The Lavon Affair poses a painful
question on the

relationship of morality to political expediency."
[BELL, Alphabet,

p. 307]

In the 1970s, American-born Israeli Joel
Lerner headed a secret group that planned to blow up the Dome of the rock,
the third holiest site for the world's Muslims. "Others included,"
noted Uri Huppert in 1988, "the present Chief Rabbi, Mordechai Eliyahu,
and a leader of the ultra-Orthodox Sephardic community." [HUPPERT, U.,
1988, p. 107]

In 1982, another Jewish American (also with
Israeli citizenship) Allen Goodman killed two Arabs near the Dome of the Rock.
Resultant Arab riots resulted in another 11 Muslims slain by Israeli soldiers
and police. Goodman was pardoned by
Israeli authorities for his murders in 1997, on the condition that he returned
to America. Still unrepentant, he declared that "what I did was politically
correct." Arab Americans in Baltimore, where Goodman was returning, expressed
worry and outrage that such a man would be living in the Maryland community.
"If I was a member of the Baltimore Muslim community, I'd watch my children
after [Goodman's] arrival," noted Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic
Relations, "As Congress enacts legislation against terrorism, it is accepting
a terrorist." [LOVIGLIO, J., 10-28-97]

In 1984 a cache of guns and explosives were
found in the same Dome of the Rock area. [HUPPERT, U., 1988, p. 109] Four
more Jews were arrested. On October 8, 1990, two months after Saddam Hussein
invaded Iraq, thousands of Muslims gathered to resist a planned march in the
area by Jewish nationalists; Israeli soldiers killed 19 Arabs and wounded
150 people in a subsequent riot.

In the 1980s a sensational plot by a group
of apocalyptic messianic Zionists to blow up the Dome of the Rock (built where the ancient Jewish Temple is reputed
to have existed) was uncovered by Israeli police. Some of the members of the
plot were officers in the Israeli army reserves. Aviezer Ravitzky describes
the plan: "It was a mystical attempt to cut off the forces of impurity,
the 'husk of Ishamael [Arabs],' from the source of their vitality on the holy
mountain. For some, however, it was also an apocalyptic move to bring about
a historic turn, to force the hand of the Master of the Universe by bringing
a catastrophe. By precipitating a great holy war against Israel, they would
'oblige' the Redeemer of Israel to wage a great and terrible campaign on their
behalf. By facing the End below, they would activate the higher powers above."
[RAVITZKY, A., p. 133]

The identities of the 27 people involved in the
arrested terrorist Jewish underground included "war heroes, teachers,
graduate students, scholars, and respected builders of pioneer towns ... they
cited the Bible and the opinions of contemporary rabbis to justify their actions."
[RAPAPORT, E., 1996, p. 3] "Several members of the same loosely-tied
West Bank Underground Movement killed several students at random in an Islamic
collge. They also planned to place bombs under civilian Arab buses."
[RAPAPORT, E., 1996, p. 9]

In a 1983 peace march by liberal Jews in
Jerusalem, Emil Grunsweig was even killed by a grenade thrown by a fellow
Jew. And in 1989 the Jewish Week reported that "two Jews were
arrested [in Israel] on suspicion of throwing the bombs [into a Jewish home]
in order to create an atmosphere of hostility against Arabs. Their intention,
police said, was to discourage the presence of Arabs in this town where three
Arabs were burned to death recently in the hut where they slept." [ROTEM,
9-2-89, p. 6]

There is nothing, of course, that should
shield the possibility that truckloads of men dressed in military fatigues
may be terrorists too. In 1982 Israeli troops invaded Lebanon, eventually
surrounding the capital city, Beirut. The announced objective was to drive
the there entrenched PLO out of artillery range of Israel. Prime Minister
Menachem Begin "compared Arafat to Hitler and the PLO's stand in Beirut
to that of Nazi Berlin in 1945."
"An
estimated 15,000 to 20,000 Palestinians, Lebanese, and Syrians, the majority
civilians, were killed during the three months of the war." [RUBENSTEIN,
A., p. 88]

Among the disturbing results of the invasion
was the notorious Shabra-Shatila massacres, much reported in the world press.
In an area under Israeli military patrol, members of the Lebanese Phalangist
militia were allowed into Palestinian refugee camps. Over 1,000 men, women,
and children were slaughtered over a 40 hour period. In response to worldwide
outrage, Begin brushed off criticism directed his way, saying that "Goyim
kill goyim, and they come to hang Jews." [PENKOWER, p. 326] Yet an International
Commission of Inquiry announced that "the Commission concluded that the
Israel authorities bear a heavy legal responsibility, as the occupying power,
for the massacres at Sabra and Chatilla. From the evidence disclosed, Israel
was involved in the planning and the preparation of the massacres and played
a facilitive role in the actual killings." In Israel itself, a commission
headed by Supreme Court Justice Yitzhak Kahan found Israeli General Ariel
Sharon "guilty of indirect responsibility" for the carnage in the
refugee camps. [RUBENSTEIN, A., p. 87]

In defense of Israeli policies in Lebanon,
Begin said, "If Hitler were hiding in the building along with
twenty innocent civilians would you not bomb the building?" In response,
Israeli novelist Amos Oz, wrote that

urge to resurrect Hitler, only to kill him
over and over again ... You

must remind yourself that the people of
Israel have a state whose

existence is now under a double threat,
not only from an enemy that

seeks its extraction, but also from our
own well-known tendency to

extreme hysteria tinged with messianic madness,
a tendency that has

brought catastrophe and destruction upon
us before in our long history."

[BLOOMFIELD, I., p. 31]

To Israeli credit, popular condemnation
of Begin and general Ariel Sharon was enormous : an estimated 400,000 people
[RUBENSTEIN, A., p. xiv] rallied against the Lebanon war, about ten percent
of Israel's Jewish population.

So what is and is not "terrorism?"
However one views the term, there is an underlying double standard always
applied in the West towards Jews and their combatants in the Middle East --
especially Muslim Arabs and Iranians, each populated with "terrorists,"
while their mirror-image Jewish equivalents are usually honored as "freedom
fighters." The famously accused Saudi-born terrorist living in Afghanistan,
Osama Bin Laden, is a case in point. As Fisk observes:

"The use of the word 'terrorist' --
where Arabs who murder the

innocent are always called 'terrorists'
whereas Israeli killers who

slaughter 29 Palestinians in a Hebron mosque
or assassinate their

prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, are called
'extremists' -- is only

part of the problem. 'Terrorist' is a word
that avoids all meaning.

The who and the how are of essential importance.
But the 'why'

is something the West usually prefers to
avoid. Not once yesterday --

not in a single press statement, press conference
or interview --

did a US leader or diplomat explain why
the enemies of America

hate America. Why is Bin Laden so angry
with the United States? ...

The reason almost certainly lies with US
policy -- or lack of policy --

towards the Middle East ... Bin Laden himself
was obsessed for

many months with the massacre of Lebanese
civilians by the Israelis

at the UN base at Qana in south Lebanon
in April 1996. Why had

Bill Clinton not condemned this 'terrorist'
act? he asked. (In fact,

Bill Clinton called it a 'tragedy,' as if
it was some form of natural

disaster -- the Israelis said it was a 'mistake'
but the UN concluded

it wasn't." [FISK, R., 8-22-98, p.
3]

As Israeli scholar Simha Flapan notes about
the double standards of Jewish and Arab "terrorism":

"

Diaspora
Jewry and friends of Israel abroad must realize that present Israeli
policy is doomed to reproduce over and over
agan the cycle of violence that
shocks our sensibilities every time we read
or hear of wanton murder and bloodshed,
whether
the hand that perpetrates it detonates a bomb or fires a pistol. The collective
revenge of an army for the murder of one
of its citizens is no more righteous or
admirable than the individual revenge of a
desperate youth for the murder of one
his people. It is only propaganda and distorted
vision tht labels one 'terrorism'
and the other 'national defense.'" [FLAPAN,
S., 1987, p. 243]

****************

Among the many things the Zionist pioneers
of modern Israel have to be ashamed about was what became known in infamy
as the "Transfer Agreement." In the early 1930s, while worldwide
Jewry and others spearheaded an economic boycott of the growing threat of
Nazi Germany, the Jewish leadership in Israel (then Palestine) made a secret
deal with the Hitler regime to get both German products to help build their
developing Jewish nation, and a number of immigrant German Jews -- some who
were particularly committed to the philosophy of Zionism. By 1935, the Palestine
economy "was saturated with German goods." [BLACK, E., p. 373]
(Peter Novick notes the "paradox" in later years that "American
Jews shunned Volkswagens and Grundig radios at a time when Israel, as a result
of [German post-war] reparations payments, was awash in German consumer durables").
[NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 109] Between 1933-1941 perhaps $100 million went to
Israel from Germany and "some of Israel's major industrial enterprises
were founded with those monies." Some 60,000 German Jews were able to
emigrate to Palestine from Hitler's regime, most because of the "agreement,"
and many with much of their wealth intact. [BLACK, E., p. 379]
One such immigrant to Israel (from Hungary), Rudolph Kastner, was assassinated
in Israel in 1957 for his role in dealing with the Nazis. As Nazi leader Adolf
Eichmann later testified: "This Dr. Kastner was a young man about my
age, an ice-cold lawyer and a fanatical Zionist. He agreed to keep the Jews
from resisting deportation -- and even keep order in the collection camps
-- if I would close my eyes and let a few hundred or a few thousand young
Jews emigrate illegally to Palestine." [BRENNER, L., p. 152]
As the clandestine Zionist dealings with the Nazis became better known,
there was worldwide outrage, especially in Jewish circles.

In 1933, for instance, a prominent American
rabbi, Abba Hillel Silver, decried the Zionist-Nazi dealings: "Why, the
very idea of Palestinian Jewry negotiating with Hitler about business instead
of demanding justice for the persecuted Jews of Germany is unthinkable. One
might think that the whole affair was a bankruptcy sale and that the Jews
of Palestine were endeavoring to salvage a few bargains for themselves."
[BLACK, p. 320] Zionists had a very
special interest in Jews who subscribed -- or at least could be pulled --
to their own political philosophy, and a dedication above all else to the
practicalities of building a Jewish state. As David Ben Gurion once said in
a closed meeting of the Jewish Agency: "If I knew that all the Jewish
children of Europe could be saved [from Hitler] by settlement in Britain and
only half could be saved by settlement in Palestine, I would choose the latter."
[AVISHAI, B., p. 152] "Labor
Zionism desired the many, but not the multitudes," explains Edwin Black,
"Mapai's [Labor's] Israel would be not for every Jew -- at least not
in the beginning. At first Israel would be for the approved cadre of pioneers."
[BLACK, E., p. 142]

"From the beginning of Hitler's regime,"
notes Peter Novick, "Ben Gurion, guided by what his biographer terms
'his philosophy of ... beneficial disaster,' had insisted that 'it is in our
interest to use Hitler ... for the building of our country"; "the
harsher the affliction, the greater the strength of Zionism." [NOVICK,
P., 1999, p. 77]

"When the Zionist organizations,"
says Hannah Arendt, "against the natural impulses of the whole Jewish
people, decided to do business with Hitler, to trade German goods against
the wealth of German Jewry, to flood the Palestinian market with German products
and thus make a mockery of the boycott against German-made articles, they
found little opposition in the Jewish National Homeland, and least of all
its aristocracy, the so-called kibbutzniks."
[ARENDT, in SELZER, p. 222]

A Jewish author, Edwin Black, wrote an
entire volume, The TransferAgreement, about this dark side
of Zionist history. "For months," he wrote, "the information
confounded me. Nothing made sense. There were so many contradictions. Nazis
helping Jewish nationalism. American Jewish leaders refusing even to criticize
the Third Reich [BLACK, E., p. xiii] ... Zionist leaders, during April 1933,
sought to cooperate with the Nazi Reich to arrange the orderly exit of Jewish
people and wealth from Germany. [BLACK, p. 104] ... In the minds of Zionists,
Jewish life in Germany could not be saved, only transferred. Even if Hitler
and the German economy were crushed, Jewish wealth in Germany would be crushed
with it. The wealth had to be saved [BLACK, p. 226] ... The Nazi Party and
the Zionist organization shared a common stake in the recovery of Germany.
If the Hitler economy failed, both sides would be ruined [BLACK, p. 253] ...
It soon became impossible to distinguish between the unhappy burden of doing
business with the Third Reich to facilitate immigration [to Israel], and the
gleeful [largely Israeli] rush of entrepreneurs frantic to cash in on the
captive capital of Germany's Jews." [BLACK, p. 310]

"Both Nazis and Zionists had something
in common," notes Lenny Brenner ... "It was shared belief [counter-Chosen
people; counter nationalisms; agreement that Jews could not assimilate into
German society] which made the Transfer Agreement possible ... For a propagandist
who seeks to strike at the very core of Jewish sensibility, awareness of the
Transfer Agreement is like a dream come true." [BRENNER, p. 164]
Edwin Black wrote about the problem he had in writing his book about
the limited Nazi-Zionist collusion: "My greatest worry is that the revelations
of this book might be used by enemies of the Jewish people. For those who
seek to besmirch the Zionist movement as racist and Nazi-like, this agreement
might seem to be perfect ammunition." [BRENNER, L., p. 164]

One especially radical branch of Zionism
had even deeper interests in German fascism. As Anthony Heilbut notes, "There
is no denying that members of the Stern Gang, like [former Israeli prime minister]
Yitzhak Shamir, had in 1940 sought an alliance with Hitler, while advocating
a national and totalitarian Jewish state." [HEILBUT, p. 345]

Since its early dealings with Hitler's
Nazi's, the Zionist cause has expanded into economic relationships with many
other totalitarian regimes, for decades deeply involved in weapons dealing
and military and police training, often with brutal dictatorships and repressive
military juntas throughout the Third World. By the 1990s, Israeli arms dealing
accounted for nearly 40% of the country's export earnings, about $1.5 billion
a year. [COCKBURN, A, p. 7] By 1987
between 20-40% of Israel's "industrial labor force" was employed
in arms making. [HUNTER, p. 13] Sometimes Israelis (both governmentally-sponsored
and as private entrepreneurs) act as a clandestine force to expedite the morally
distasteful "dirty work" of United States foreign policy; more often
Israel and its functionaries are maverick international predators engaged
in state and personal self-interest. It is an insidious role of profiteering
upon the death, destruction, and misery of people the world over, a modern
revival of one of the old Jewish entrepreneurial bases: war contracting. "Zionism,"
notes Israeli Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, "has clear, inescapable ideological
implications, in terms of dealing with the Third World. Zionism meant the
creation of a Jewish sovereignty in Palestine through settlement and political
domination. Thus, by definition, it entails an attack on the indigenous populations,
and a confrontation with the Third World." [BEIT-HALLAHMI, p. 229]

"In 1993," notes Alan Vorspan,
"the CIA testified before a Congressional committee that Israel is involved
in a major arms deal with China and providing China with advanced technology
that the United States and other western powers will not supply. In the past,
Israel has sold arms to unsavory 'right wing' dictatorships operating death
squads in Central America at a time when Congress sought to cut off arms shipments
to human rights violators. Israel was the primary provider of arms -- perhaps
even nuclear technology -- to apartheid South Africa at a time when the racist
regime was held in contempt by the rest of the world. Israel played a role
in the tragi-comic Irangate debacle .... Among western-style democracies ...
Israel's track record makes it one of the world's most promiscuous arms dealers."
[VORSPAN, p. 23]

The best known incident in recent years
of underhanded military dealing was the so-called Iran-Contra scandal in the
1980s when the state of Israel -- at the request of the Reagan administration
-- circumvented existing United States laws to get weapons to American-supported
"Contra" rebels fighting the Marxist government of Nicaragua. Arms
were also provided to Iran by Israel in secret efforts to free American hostages
in the Middle East. But this much-publicized escapade is only the tip of an
ominous iceberg. Less widely known, for example, is a 1994 State Department
ban on all United States trade to two Israeli companies owned by Nachum Mamber.
Mamber is alleged to have sold materials to Iran that have use in the manufacture
of chemical weapons." [HIRSCHENBERG, p. 13]

Earlier, Israel had been a prominent exporter
of weapons to Nicaragua during the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza Garcia
"until the defeat of Somoza by the Sandanistas." [ELKIN, p. 245]

"The extent of Israeli activities
in the Third World is baffling to both friends and foes of Israel," wrote
Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, a professor at Israel's University of Haifa, in 1987,
".... Mention any trouble spot in the Third World over the past ten years
and, inevitably, you will find smiling Israeli officers and shining Israeli
weapons on the news pages ... We have seen them in South Africa, Iran, Nicaragua,
El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Namibia, Taiwan, Indonesia, the Philippines,
Chile, Bolivia, and many other places ... [HALLAHMI, p. xii].... Most of the
details of these involvements are not known while they take place. So that
reliance on open sources will inevitably lead us to underestimate the extent
of the involvement. Consequently, present Israeli activities are probably
much wider and deeper than what we have been told in public forums or the
media." [BEIT-HALLAHMI, p. xiii]

"The main markets for Israeli military
goods and services have shifted over time," says R. T. Naylor, "from
sub-Saharan Africa to Iran to Central America to South Africa and Latin America
today. But the nature of the favoured customer has changed little. Where there
is a particularly thuggish regime in power, especially one so ostracized from
the rest of the international community, that it is willing to pay premium
prices, Israel is likely to be there, energetically peddling its wares."
[TAYLOR, p. 135] "Every time
there's a television show dealing with the seaminess and underside of American
foreign policy, a "pro-Israel" Congressional aide told the Jerusalem
Report, "and you see an Israeli arms dealer sitting there, it hurts Israel."
[GOLDBERG, J.J., 6-11-1991, p. 26]

"New reports," says Adam Garfinkle,
"noted Israeli weapons were even ending up with the Serbs in 1995."
[GARFINKLE, p. 194] That year a Jewish
immigrant to Israel from what was formerly Yugoslavia, Igor Primoract, a professor
of philosophy at Hebrew University, also wrote an article charging that Israel's
Mossad was funneling weapons to Serbia despite a world-wide arms embargo.
"The Israeli government," said Primoract, "has been at odds
with most of the rest of the world since Yugoslavia began disintegrating.
In ... 1991, when Serbia's onslaught on Croatia was in full swing and Serbian
atrocities were receiving worldwide coverage, Israel accepted Belgrade's offer
to set up diplomatic relations." [CURTISS, R., 5-1-1995]

"In today's Israel," noted Dan
Raviv and Yossi Melaman in 1990," ... making money has become a Golden
Calf before which much of the society -- including its intelligence and military
circles -- kneels ... [RAVIV/MELMAN, p. 347] ... The new symbols for Israel
in the international community have become the arms merchants and other 'formers'
[i.e., former military men in the private arms business]." [RAVIV/MELMAN,
p. 359]

Reflecting the kind of society Israel has
become, Hirschberg wrote that

"Israeli private security firms are
active 'in every country imaginable,'

says one leading expert. They've trained
anti-terrorist units in the

jungles of South America and security
officers at Mexican power

plants. For years, an Israel-run firm
guarded the Presidential palace

in Nigeria. Since 1993, the Israeli firm
Levron ... has been setting up

an army from scratch in the Congo ...
The Tel Aviv Golden Pages

classified phone book has ten full pages
listing private investigation

firms, offering everything from personal
protection and domestic

investigations to debt collection, lie
detector tests, electronic

surveillance and debugging, and recovery
of stolen property ...

The Jerusalem Report contacted
about two dozen of the hundreds

of firms listed. All confirmed that their
top staffers were veterans

of some branch of the government security
services of the police.

And their field workers were all recent
graduates of army elite

combat units." [HIRSCHBERG, p. 14-16]

Israeli involvement in fueling bloody Third
World struggles is long standing. During the dictatorship of the Shah of Iran,
Israel was only second to the United States in military support to him. "In some areas such as domestic intelligence [the training of Iran's dreaded
secret police]," says Beit-Hallahmi, "Israel's involvement was even
greater." [BEIT-HALLAHMI, p. 9] A
political scientist observed in 1965 that the Shah's Iran "supplied much
of Israel's oil needs during the Arab [oil] boycott [of Israel] ... Although
not generally known, Iran maintains a close military liaison with Israel's
army staff ... The magnitude of the Iran-Israeli program remains generally
secret." [BEIT-HALLAHMI, p. 10]

In eleven visits to Iran in the 1970s by
Israeli prime ministers, a foreign minister, and a defense minister, "the
man who hosted all these visits was Nematollah Nasri, deputy prime minister
and head of SAVAK, the Iranian secret police." [BEIT-HALLAHMI, p. 10]
was internationally notorious for its kidnapping, torture, and murder of Iranian
citizens, well documented by Amnesty International and other human rights
groups. The Washington Post reported a source who claimed during that
era that "innumerable Iranians, including many in a position to know,
told me that the Israelis oversee the SAVAK technique." [BEIT-HALLAHMI,
p. 11] A 1976 CIA report noted that "Mossad has engaged in joint operations
with SAVAK over the years since the late 1950s." [BLACK/MORRIS, p. 183]
Israel also helped the Shah put down a revolt of dissident tribesmen in southern
Iran in 1963 and was working with the dictator in developing a missile that
could deliver nuclear war heads when the Iranian revolution toppled him. [BEIT-HALLAHMI,
p. 11]

In Turkey, the Israeli international spy
organization -- Mossad -- has had a station since the 1950s and helped train
the Turkish secret police. [BEIT-HALLAHMI, p. 16] Citing a CIA report, Ian Black and Benny Morris note that "the
Mossad set up a triangular organization with the Turkish National Security
Services (TNSS) and the Iranian SAVAK." [BLACK/MORRIS, p. 189] "There
is one well-publicized aspect of the unpublished contacts between Israel and
Turkey," says Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, "The Israeli government forbid
any mention of the Turkish genocide of Armenians in 1915 in any government-controlled
media or government-sponsored activities ... It has taken actions against
any mention of the Armenian case." [BEIT-HALLAHMI, p. 17] In 1998, Neil
Lochery noted that "The Turkish alliance [with Israel] is ideal given
the Turkish military's eagerness to undertake a programme of modernization
of its large armed forces using primarily Israeli companies. In simple terms,
[military] orders placed by the Turks have prevented [Israeli] job losses
and helped secure projects which may have otherwise been in jeopardy."
[LOCHERY, p. 58]

In 1999 Israeli security guards at the Israeli
Consulate in Berlin opened fire on a crowd of 100 rioting Kurds, killing two
men and a woman and wounding fifteen others. The protesters had gathered in
outrage of the Mossad's alleged role in capturing Kurdish rebel hero Abdullah
Ocalan in Greece for Turkey. [WILLIAMS, C., p. A1] Earlier, in 1998, two Israelis
were captured in Cyprus, under suspicion that they were spying for Turkey.
"The Israeli media," noted Agence France Presse, "accepted that the men were Israeli agents
but varied widely over what they were doing." [CHARLAMBOUS, C., 11-8-1998]

In 1991 four Israeli agents were also caught
attempting to bug the Iranian embassy in Cyprus, in 1998 Mossad members were
caught bugging the home of Swiss citizen of Lebanese origin, and in 1996 two
Israeli agents were captured in a failed attempt to murder a Hamas leader
in Jordan. [CHARLAMBOUS, C., 11-8-1998]

Israel has long aided the dictatorial dynasty
of Sultan Qaboos ibn Said in Oman. Mossad has also helped stir Kurdish revolts
in Iraq beginning in 1958 and has long supported minority Christian groups
in Lebanon to secure an Israeli buffer zone against hostile Muslim areas.
This included Pierre Gemayel's fascist Phalangist party, founded in 1936.
[BEIT-HALLAHMI, p. 18] The 1976 creation of the South Lebanon Army has also
long functioned as a "puppet organization" for Israeli interests."
[BEIT-HALLAHMI, p. 19]

Mossad's main clandestine station in Asia
is in Singapore, from which Israel has maintained military ties with South
Korea and Taiwan. "Particularly
sensitive," says Joel Kotkin, " ... are Israeli arms traders and
elite military training teams who, for the purposes of mollifying Muslim public
opinion both inside Singapore and in neighboring countries, pass themselves
off as 'Mexicans' to the local citizenry." [KOTKIN, p. 39] "It has
been reported," notes Beit-Hallahmi, "that Israel has transferred
to Taiwan both nuclear technologies and chemical-warfare technology and a
CIA report [says that Israel] has provided intelligence training to the Taiwanese
secret services." [BEIT-HALLAHMI, p. 28]
Not far away, "Indonesia and Israel have a long-standing military
relationship." [PARIS, p. 112]

In 1999, USA Today headlined a story
"U.S. is concerned, but unable to stop Israel-China deal." The Jewish
state ignored American concerns despite the billions of dollars in aid it
receives from America. The deal with mainland China was for high-tech AWACS
radar systems to be installed on Chinese jets, elevating them to new thresholds
of warfare capabilities. "The United States has banned military sales
to China since that country's 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators
in Tiananmen Square," noted USA Today,
"But Israel, though it has received billions of dollars worth
of U.S. military aid, is under no such limitation, provided that the technology
it sells has no U.S. content." [SLAVIN, B., p. 17A]

In the Philippines, dictator Ferdinand Marcos
"was protected by Israeli bodyguards who had served in elite Israeli
commando units. The wealthy friends of the President also enjoyed such services."
Entire "private armies" in the Philippines were trained by Israeli
advisers. [BEIT-HALLAHMI, p. 28-29]

The distinction between the Israeli government
itself and Israeli private citizen entrepreneurship in supporting brutally
repressive regimes against freedom and justice movements worldwide is blurred.
Former Israeli military officers, and even rank and file soldiers (usually
from "elite" units), invariably remain active in the army as "reserves"
to age 55 and still well-connected thereafter. Private exploitation of worldwide
disaster is often indivisible from the clandestine policies of the Israeli
government. An example of this private enterprise-Israeli government symbiosis
is the Tel Aviv-based Tamuz Control Systems, an organization owned by a retired
general who "offers Third World regimes assistance in solving their security
problems." [BEIT-HALLAHMI, p. 30]

Israeli governmental enterprise and private
military business exploits are so entwined that when two private citizens,
employed by Tamuz, passed along classified military material to the Philippines
in 1984, despite some attention in the Israeli press, it was ultimately deemed
to be inconsequential. The reason? The two Tamuz employees in question had
worked -- and still had contacts with
-- an Israeli anti-terrorist unit. As an Israeli newspaper reported: "[Tamuz]
is headed by former generals and the transfer of material to Third World companies
is coordinated with senior defense officials." Another reporter wrote
that, "The offense is only technical because, as is known, [Tamuz] is
directed by former generals who are in constant contact with SHABAK and MOSSAD
[Israeli secret police organizations]." [BEIT-HALLAHMI, p. 30]
As Beit-Hallahmi sees it:

"Israeli mercenaries ... arrive at
their destinations through a system

that has much to do with the Israeli state,
and most of them are

emissaries of the state, not soldiers of
fortune. There is a connection

and a similarity of oppression in one particular
situation and oppressions

in other situations, geographically and
culturally remote. How does an

Israeli officer feel in Namibia or while
training South Africans in counter-

insurgency? The answer is 'right at home.'"
[BEIT-HALLAHMI, p. 233]

Israel also has a MOSSAD station in Jakarta,
Indonesia, fronted as a commercial company; Israeli advisers also helped Sri
Lanka in its ongoing efforts to quell the rebellious Tamil minority. Israeli
weaponry or personnel has also found its way to Afghanistan, Thailand, and
China. [BEIT-HALLAHMI, p. 32-36]

In Africa, Israelis helped train the armies
of the Ivory Coast, the Central African Republic, Dahomey (Benin), Cameroon,
Senegal, Togo, Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Somalia. [BEIT-HALLAHMI,
p. 38] "In several African countries," notes Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi,
"we can observe a pattern in which, without formal relations, our Israeli
agent manages to get very close to the head of state, becoming known as the
President's personal adviser, his right hand man, or his best friend. Such
patterns were in evidence in Senegal, Zaire, Liberia, the Ivory Coast, and
other places. The MOSSAD agent performing his task is typically charming."
[BEIT-HALLAHMI, p. 73]

In 2001, the Democratic Republic of Congo "revoked
the monopoly of the Israeli company International Diamond Industries."
A United Nations report had documented that the Congo was being cheated by
the company and that it was the African nation's desire for "access to
Israeli military equipment and intelligence, that sealed the original deal
for the monopoly." [AVNI, B., 4-27-2001]

For years, the Israeli Mossad has also had
worldwide assassination teams to eliminate Palestinian leaders who violently
struggled against Israeli "occupation" of their homeland. It is
even believed to have assassinated Gerald Bull, a Canadian scientist who had
in recent years helped Iraq in one of its weapons program. "The full
truth about Israeli hit squads," note Ian Black and Benny Morris, "will
probably never be known. The basis of all such operations is complete deniability,
however implausible these denials may be. In [one such] case, the need for
operational secrecy was twofold: to guarantee the safety of the killers and
their back up teams; and to prevent the expose of any official [Israeli] connection
to the assassinations." [BLACK/MORRIS, p. 272] Among the most publicized
Israeli-backed assassinations was the 1973 murder of an Arab worker in a small
town in Norway, a case of mistaken identity. Six Israeli Mossad agents were
captured, five received prison terms, the longest sentence was only five years.
[BLACK/MORRIS, p. 276] More recently,
in a bungled attempt, a group of Mossad agents were captured when they tried
to murder a Hamas leader in Jordan by throwing poison in his ear.

Close Israeli attachment to the apartheid
regime of South Africa was often questioned, even in the world media. In 1963
a United Nations Security Council resolution called upon the nations of the
world to boycott South Africa militarily; in 1977 a second resolution made
the boycott mandatory. Israel ignored both completely. [BEITH-HALLAHMI, p.
117] Israel is even believed to have conducted joint nuclear tests with South
Africa in 1979, 1981, and 1985. [HUNTER, p. 36-38] Among Israeli activities
in support of South Africa was financial investment in the apartheid regime,
including, notes Jane Hunter, "a rapacious 'private enterprise' interest
in the Bantustans, the barren pseudo-states that warehouses much of the black
majority ... [HUNTER, p. 71] ... No government in the world recognized the
benighted Bantustans as the independent countries the racist regime has declared
them to be." [HUNTER, p. 74] Israelis were even employed to guard casino
tables at Sun City, a gambling resort linked to the Bantustan of Bophuthatswana.
By 1985 there were 200 Israeli advisers, technicians, and entrepreneurs in
the Bantustan of Ciskei alone (near Capetown), an area described "as
one of the most economically underdeveloped areas in the world." [HUNTER,
p. 71] That year a series of scandals and scams by Israeli investors resulted
in their expulsion from the area. [HUNTER, p. 72]

"I cannot understand," remarked
South African Black leader Bishop Desmund Tutu in 1987 to a Jewish audience,
"how people with your history would have a state that would collaborate
in military matters with South Africa and carry out policies that are a mirror
image of some of the things from which your people suffered." [JEWISH
WEEK, 3-20-87, p. 17] An American
journalist could understand the link. In 1972 J. Hoagland noted that "to
Afrikaners, the parallels [between them and the Israelis] are as obvious as
they are embarrassing to the Israelis. They and the Israelis are essentially
white, Europeanized peoples who have carved their own nations out of land
inhabited by hostile, non-European majorities that would destroy the two nations
if the Afrikaners and Israelis listened to the United Nations or world opinion.
Their religions are similar, each being a 'chosen people.'" [BEIT-HALLAHMI,
p. 160]

During the Algerian war for independence
to break from French colonialism, Israelis supported the ultra-right wing
French OAS settler community. [BEIT-HALLAHMI, p. 44] Indigenous Jews in Algeria
(a community of about 100,000 people) also provided information to the Mossad
about Algerian revolutionary activities against French control of the country;
this information was passed along to the French (Israel was at the time seeking
French good graces for joint research in the creation of a nuclear bomb).
[HERSH, p. 36]

In Morocco, by 1965 Israelis had "set
up [King] Hassan's internal security system, including the personal guard
unit to the King himself." [BEIT-HALLAHMI, p. 46] Israeli aided in helping
the Moroccan government murder a dissident, Mehdi Ben-Barka, on French soil
which caused an international incident. [BEIT-HALLAHMI, p. 46] "Since King Hassan's succession to the
throne of Morocco in 1961," note Ian Black and Benny Morris, "Israel's
intelligence had enjoyed a special relationship with his security services
... Israeli operatives helped the new king to reform his secret service and
trained its agents on a regular basis." [BLACK/MORRIS, p. 203]
During Tunisia's struggle against French colonialism, there was fighting
between French and Tunisian troops in 1961 over a French naval base near the
town of Bizerte. "Hundreds of Arabs died. The 1,200 strong Jewish community
was accused of collaborating with the French. Many of the Jews worked in the
base or serviced it." [BLACK/MORRIS, p. 181]

In Sudan, Israelis discretely aided Anyanya
rebels in its South. Also, "by the mid-1980s," notes Jacob Abadi,
"Israel became increasingly concerned over the fate of the Falasha Jews
in Ethiopia and in the refugee camps of Sudan. Besides, Israel had other grandiose
schemes, which required Sudanese cooperation. Israel sought to establish a
huge arsenal on Sudanese territory. In addition, Israel explored the possibility
of using Sudan as a base of operations, aimed at helping the son of the deposed
Shah of Iran to return to Iran and topple Ayatollah Khomeini's regime."
[ABADI, 1999]

In Ghana "military and intelligence
cooperation ... [and] training was given by MOSSAD." [BEIT-HALLAHMI,
p. 49] In Ethiopia, Israel joined with the United States and Britain in trying
to prevent the collapse of the Haile Selassie regime to the Eritrean Liberation
Front. Israelis had earlier helped train the Ethiopian secret police. [BEIT-HALLAHMI,
p. 51-52] "INCODA, a wholly-owned
company that exported Ethiopians beef was a useful commercial front for intelligence
activities ... In December 1960 the Israelis helped [Emperor] Haile Selassie
crush a coup attempt." [BLACK/MORRIS, p. 186-187]

"In Zaire," says Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi,
"the regime of Mobuto Sese Seko ... can only be described as a murderous
tyranny ... When we look at the record carefully, we discover that Israel
has played a continuous role for twenty-five years in keeping Zaire under
western control and under Mobutu's." [BEIT-HALLAHMI, p. 55] MOSSAD agent
Meir Meyohas was even "Mobutu's personal right hand man for over twenty
years." [BEIT-HALLAHMI, p. 60] Mobutu believed "in the great power
of the Jews to influence governments and the press, especially in the United
States." [BEIT-HALLAHMI, p. 57] To pander to this conviction, it was
arranged for Kenneth Bialkin, chairman of the President's Conference on American-Jewish
Leaders, "to represent Mobutu in the United States." [BEIT-HALLAHMI,
p. 57]

In Uganda, the notoriously ruthless ruler
Idi Amin was installed by Israel, the United States, and British intrigue;
"the Israeli advisers in Uganda were especially close to Colonel Idi
Amin." [BEIT-HALLAHMI, p. 61] "The Israelis," observed two
scholars on the area, "... were disturbed by [the former head of Uganda
and his] growing anti-Zionism ... Amin they thought would be a useful puppet
and come to rely on a large military presence for his survival." [BEIT-HALLAHMI,
p. 62] When Palestinians hijacked an Air France jet to Israel in 1976, in
the famous Entebbe airport incident in which Israeli troops clandestinely
flew to Uganda and freed Jewish hostages in a shootout, it helped in siege
plans that the Entebbe airport had been built by an Israeli company, Solel
Bonch, which provided Israeli rescuers with information about airport terrain.
[BLACK/MORRIS, p. 340]

In Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) Israel supported
the colonial white minority regime in various ways, including the construction
of a 500-mile long mine field along the Rhodesian border with Mozambique and
Zambia. There were even Israeli mercenaries in the Rhodesian army. [BEIT-HALLAHMI,
p. 63]

In Mozambique and Angola, Israelis had militarily
equipped Portuguese colonial regimes against indigenous liberation movements;
in Kenya Israel supplied arms, in Chad advisers and weapons during its civil
war. In 1984 five Israelis were arrested in England as they tried to smuggle
a drugged former Nigerian senator, Umaru Dikko, in a box out of the country
and back to Africa to a new regime. Conspirators included an Israeli doctor,
Lev Shapira. At their trial, they said they worked for the Israeli secret
service, the Mossad. [RAVIV, p. 357]

In Latin America, formal and informal Israeli
support of murderous military dictatorships has been widespread. As one commentator
put it: "Many former [Israeli] officers have been traveling through Central
America offering their services as
anti-terror consultants, personal advisers, trainers, and even simple bodyguards."
[BEIT-HALLAHMI, p. 78] Yair Klein, for instance, helped train Colombian drug cartels in
paramilitary techniques. "A videotape broadcast in August 1989,"
note Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman, "show Klein and other Israelis training
armed Colombians who were identified as assassin squads for the cocaine barons
of Medellin." [RAVIV/MELMAN, p. 355] And "ex-Mossad man Mike Harari,"
says Hirschberg, "a close
aide to Panama's international drug-dealing President Manuel Noreiga, reportedly
obtained weapons systems and bugging devices for the dictator." [HIRSCHBERG,
p. 13]

By 1975 Israel had become a major arms
supplier to the region. "Central American generals," notes Benjamin
Beit-Hallahmi, "often say they admire Israel because they view the Israelis
they know as practical, efficient, and tough, and because they see Israel
'unencumbered' by issues of human rights.'" [BEIT-HALLAHMI, p. 77-78]
"The Israelis do not let this human rights thing stand in the way of
business," one Guatemalan politician told Reuters, "You pay,
they deliver. No questions asked. Unlike the gringos." [BEIT-HALLAHMI,
p. 78] Another reason the Israelis are appreciated by military juntas, says
Beit-Hallahmi, is because of "the strong pro-Israel lobby in the United
States, which is believed to be able to do wonders for a reactionary regime
in the dangerous waters of United States public opinion." [BEIT-HALLAHMI,
p. 78]

Latin America has been home to some Jews
for centuries. In 1987, during bloody turmoil going on throughout the area,
the Jewish Week noted that:

Among the various profitable areas of suffering
in Central America is Guatemala. "Even in the midst of the endless misery
and cruelty of Central America," observes Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, "Guatemala
stands out as a country where those in power have been fighting the powerless
with an unusual degree of ruthlessness and bloodiness. Over the years reports
of the horrible realities of Guatemala have been numerous and the judgements
harsh. What is unique is the extent to which those who carried out the deliberate
policies of endless killings have proclaimed their indebtedness to Israel,
as the source not only of their hardware, but of their inspiration. Israel
became the main support of the Guatemalan regime." [BEIT-HALLAHMI, p.
79] In merely one incident there was "the discovery by the Greek
authorities of an Israeli arms consignment on board a ship bound for Central
America. The cargo included eighty tons of ammunition, twenty tons of explosives,
and a helicopter which, according to crew members, were going to Guatemala
for delivery to neighboring countries." [KLICH, p. 38]

The Israeli presence in Guatemala has been
deep, from military advisers to corporate arms dealers. Some have, unusually,
even personally engaged in killing expeditions. "Israeli soldiers are
not just instructors," noted Beit-Hallahmi, "Israeli advisers --
some official, others private -- helped Guatemala internal security agents
hunt underground rebel groups. They have been directly engaged in counterinsurgency
campaigns against the Indian communities." [BEIT-HALLAHMI, p. 84]
"Israel not only provided the technology for the reign of terror,"
observes Jane Hunter, "it helped in the organization and commission of
the horrors perpetrated by the Guatemalan military and police." [HUNTER,
p. 111] By 1987 at least 45,000 people were killed and a million exiled within
their own country.

In El Salvador, even during the Carter Administration's
sanctions against the country as a major human rights violator, Israel maintained
its usual ruthless presence there too, involved in "anti-guerilla assistance."
"During 1977-79," says Beit-Hallahmi, "when Israel was most
active [in El Salvador], it was also training counterinsurgency teams less
elegantly known as death squads." [BEIT-HALLAHMI, p. 86] During the Carter
sanctions, "Israel supplied the military regime of El Salvador with over
80% of its weaponry for the next several years, including napalm for use against
the Salvadoran civilian population." [MARSHALL/SCOTT/HUNTER, 1987, p.
89]

Israel's undercover secret police and military
assistance has also been provided to the dictatorial regimes of Honduras and
Nicaragua. With the collapse of the Somoza dictatorship in the latter, Israelis
joined United States efforts to topple the new Marxist regime. In the resulting
Civil War, the Israeli press reported that "on June 26, 1979 ... Israeli-made
Arava planes were being used to bomb the poor neighborhoods of Managua [the
capital of Nicaragua]." [BEIT-HALLAHMI, p. 91] Prominent "private"
Israeli arms dealers and their agents funneling weapons to the anti-government
Contras included Ya'acov Nimrodi, Pesakh Ben Or, Pinhas Dagan, Amos Gil'ad,
Michael Kokin, Emil Sa'ada, Yehuda Leitner, and David Marcus Katz. [MARSHALL,
SCOTT, HUNTER, 1987, p. 115-116]

"Pro-Israel groups in the United States,"
says Benjamin Ginzburg, "cooperated closely with the [Reagan] administration's
efforts] to undermine support for the [leftist Nicaraguan] Sandanista regime
... Jewish groups, including the Anti-Defamation League, obliged ... They
worked with White House officials ... to publicized charges that the Sandanista
government was anti-Semitic." [GINZBURG, p. 210]
(In 1983 the U.S. Embassy in Nicaragua noted that it had "no verifiable
ground" to charge the Sandanista government with anti-Semitism. The Associated
Press even noted in 1986 that most Jews fled Nicaragua
when its dictator was toppled, and that perhaps as few as five Jewish families
remained in that country. [NOKES, R., 3-20-86]

In March 1988 the Jewish Week reported
that "[President] Reagan accused the [leftist] Sandanista regime of rampant
anti-Semitism and of cooperating with the Palestinian Liberation Organization.
Behind the scenes, the President's remarks were, in part, the result of research
provided by the National Jewish Coalition (which began life as a committee
of the 1980 Reagan-Bush campaign) and brought to the president's attention
by the White House liaison to the Jewish community, Max Green." [BESSER,
p. 9]

In the 1980s, Panama military strongman
Manual Noreiga ran the country and its links to Colombian drug rings, assassinations,
and frauds with the help of right-hand man Mike Harari, an Israeli Mossad
officer. For a time, a Jew, Eric Arturo Delvalle, was the formal President of Panama; his brother-in-law
was the publisher (Robert Eisenman, a convert to Judaism) of Panama's major
daily newspaper, La Prensa. [GOLDBERG, JW, 6-31-87, p. 4]

In Haiti, Israelis were army suppliers and
advisers to dictator Jean Claude Duvallier, and in Chile "Israel became
a major arms supplier ... after the Carter Administration suspended all United
States aid to the Pinochet regime in 1977." [BEIT-HALLAHMI, p. 99] Israelis
were also involved in varying military degrees with regimes in Argentina,
Paraguay, and Bolivia. "Israel continued the selling armaments to Argentina
during [its] Dirty War," notes Judith Elkin, "Some Israeli weapons
bought by the junta were undoubtedly used for repressing civilian populations,
Jews and non-Jews alike. Critics (including Rabbi Marshall Meyer, a principal
defender of human rights during the proceso) condemned Israel's readiness
to sell weapons to morally indefensible regimes." [ELKIN, 1998, p. 144]

Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, in his 1987 volume,
The Israeli Connection, underscores what he believes to be some of
the disturbing foundations to all this Israeli profiteering in blood and gore
throughout the world. In this view,
such deep Israeli activism in the suppression of liberation and human rights
movements everywhere in the Third World has a close echo to the situation
in their own backyard: the Palestinians. To accept any movement for human
justice against imperialism and colonialism across the globe is to be forced
to inevitably recognize and uncomfortably face the profound injustices Israel
inflicts upon the Arab community in, and around, its own territory. "The
idea of liberation for Third World groups," says Beit-Hallahmi, "threatens
the very existence of Zionism. Concepts of human rights are too dangerous
for the Israeli political system ... The injustice done to the Palestinians
is so clear and so striking that it cannot be openly discussed, and any discussion
of what Israel has been doing in the Third World is certain to lead to an
examination of the rights of the Palestinians." [BEIT-HALLAHMI, p. 236]
To allow the many dictatorships of the world to collapse and be replaced
by political liberation movements would be to increasingly isolate the oppressive
state of Israel as an extinct breed, and grievously endanger it.

Beit-Hallahmi, himself an Israeli citizen,
addresses the disturbing issue at stake here succinctly:

"Israeli activities in the Third World
are significant reflections of the

basic nature of Zionism and the state of
Israel, and the resulting Israeli

society and worldview. From Manila in the
Philippines to Teguicgala

in Honduras to Windhoek in Namibia, Israel's
emissaries have been

involved in continuous war which is truly
a world war. And what

enemy is Israel fighting? It is the population
of the Third World,

which cannot be allowed to win its revolution.
The only thing

that guarantees the continuing rule of
Third World oligarchies is

the suppression of any spark of independence
or power among

their peoples. Israeli advisers have much
to offer in the technology

of death and oppression and that is why
they are so much in demand."

[BEIT-HALLAHMI, p. 243]

But the Israeli marketing of death does
not stop suddenly at the doors of the Third World. For all the billions of
dollars the United States government continues to pour into Israel and its
military foundation in search of Jewish "security" in the Middle
East, there is even a disturbing payback form the Jewish state in helping
to make the streets of America as
dangerously insecure as possible. Israeli arms profiteering, after
all, knows no moral compulsion and must seek any selling opportunity. In September
1997 the Los Angeles Times noted that:

"Thirty United States senators urged
President Clinton to suspend

the importation of thousands of assault
weapons that have come to

symbolize the ineffectiveness of laws
designed to staunch the spread

of such rapid-fire weapons ... Specifically,
the lawmakers asked Clinton

to block the importation from Israel of
semi-automatic Uzi and Galil

firearms that have been modified to avoid
restrictions placed on them

and other assault weapons in 1994 ...
[Senator Robert G. Torricelli of

New Jersey], a strong supporter of Israel,
said he had never envisioned

he would be part of a campaign critical
of that country's government,

which owns the company exporting the contested
weapons. 'If there is

any country in the world that should understand
the problem of

dangerous weapons and the damage they
can do in a civil society,'

Torricelli said, 'it is Israel.' He said
he could not let 'an obvious evasion

of the law' exist without adding his voice."
[BRAZIL, 9-28-97,

p. A28]

*************************************

With all the evidence of chronic racism,
injustice, inhumanity, brutality, ruthlessness, exploitation, oppression and
aggregations of all manners of expressive
evil
noted in this chapter, what may we conclude about the continued, widespread
Jewish American effort to stick their collective heads in the sand and stifle
much-merited criticism of their hallowed "homeland?" What planet,
for instance, was Eugene Borowitz on when he declared twenty years ago that
"most diaspora Jews are proud of the state of Israel for what it has
done to transform the normal dictates of politics to a more humane style of
using power." [BOROWITZ, p. 127]
For
many American Jews, of course, endlessly absorbed in identity myth-making,
trying to salvage Jewish "chosenness" in a democratic context, the
contradictory avenues of Jewish ethnocentric "particularism" and
pan-human "universalism" are, as always, forcibly entwined like
a band-aid to an oil slick in cushioning Jewish-American conscience. Israel, claims Leonard Fein, "was -- and
is -- an effort to produce a society parochial in structure but universal
in ideology." [FEIN, p. 6] "The
primary concern ... of Zionism," insists Steven Katz, "is justice."
[KATZ, in STALLSWORTH, p. 99] "I'll tell you what Zionism is," said New York politician
Bella Azburg, "It's a liberation movement for a people who have been
persecuted all their lives throughout human history." [POGREBIN, L.,
p. 48]

Not surprisingly, in the widely held Jewish
view, criticism of Israel is merely a disguised version of irrational anti-Semitism.
"According to an unpublished survey in 1986 by the political scientist
Asher Arian," notes Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen, "58% of all
Israeli Jews believe that criticism of Israel heard in the world stems from
anti-Semitism." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 62] "Since 1967," says Israeli Meron
Benvenisti, "[Israel] has become one of the pariah states in the international
system. Israelis do not try to explain their isolation in rational terms such
as opposition to their holdings in the occupied territories or international
power politics. For them it is a recurrence of anti-Semitism directed now
towards the new Jewish state instead
of towards individual Jewish communities in the Diaspora. This being the case,
all criticism can be dismissed as anti-Semitic and unfavorable actions perceived
as an added instance of persecution." [BENVENISTI, p. 77]

In America, in one survey six out of ten
American Jews agreed in 1993 that 'the criticism of Israel that we hear about
derives mainly from anti-Semitism." [LIPSET/RAAB, p. 126] "It always
astounds me," wrote Letty Pogrebin, a senior editor at Ms magazine,
"when people say that the answer to anti-Semitism is Palestinian rights
rather than the lack of Jew-hating." [POGREBIN, in KLEIN] "Anti-Semitism," says psychoanalyst
Mortimer Ostrow, "has acquired a new face recently -- it presents itself
as antagonism to the state of Israel." [OSTROW, p. 58] "One senses
hostility towards things Jewish in a nonreflective anti-Israel stance,"
says Sara Horowitz (about African-Americans, Hispanics, and other American
"multicultural" minority groups), "an inclination to overlook,
minimize, or trivialize racism when aimed against Jews; a denigration of Jewish
traditions, communities, habits, cultural markings, and learning." [HOROWITZ,
S., 1998, p. 120]

"On this point," notes Arthur Liebman, the
Jewish [political] Left, Center, and Right as well are in strong agreement:
the Left's denial of the legitimacy of Israel is necessary and sufficient
grounds to label it anti-Semitic." [LIEBMAN, A., 1986, p. 352]

"Anti-Israel sentiment," asserts
Justin Hertog of Vassar College, "has replaced anti-Semitism as a more
sophisticated form of Jew-hatred." [HERTOG, p. 14] "Blanket condemnation of Zionism as against
specific Zionist policies," declares Irving Greenberg, "is
ipso facto anti-Semitism." [ELLIS,
M., 1990, p. 27] "An area of major concern today," wrote Yehuda
Baer, "is that very complicated issue of anti-Semitism masquerading as
anti-Zionism ... Whether one deals with Israel as a people or Israel as a
state, anti-Zionism is an anti-Jewish program." [PEARL/PEARL, p. 129]
In the world of sociology, complained Irving Horowitz in 1993, there are "assaults
on the 'fascist' state of Israel, with the claim that the high participation
of Israeli sociologists in the American Sociological Association is a function
of 'the huge U.S. aid to Israel.' The emergence of Israel as a nation state,
far from taming the anti-Semitic conundrums, has only intensified such attacks
... Whether this anti-Zionist/anti-Jewish tendency will sprout wings and take
off remains difficult to determine." [HOROWITZ, I., p. 91]

"Those who are critical of Israel,"
says Tobin, "are more likely to hold anti-Semitic stereotypes. Some anti-Israelis
may represent new forms of anti-Semitic expression." [TOBIN, p. 50] "Almost
half a century after the establishment of the Jewish state," adds Evyatar
Friesel, "... many Zionists have discovered that there are historical
characteristics in the Jewish community that are very resilient. None seemed
more resilient than what Leon Pinsker, over a hundred years ago, called the
'Judeophobia of the Gentile.' It is quite astonishing that more than forty
years of Jewish statehood has hardly changed the basic premises of the relationship
between Jews and non-Jews." [FRIESEL, E., p. 232]

"To say that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism is a lie,"
once declared prominent Jewish Argentinian Jacobo Timerman, "It is like
saying that there is difference between authoritarianism and totalitarian
governments -- another adventure in semantics." [BECK, E., 1982, p. 193]

The profoundly disturbing subtext to such
commentary is that it is not the aberrant commentary of marginal Jewish fanatics,
it is the Jewish norm. Intelligent,
well-read, informed, largely secular people collectively cling in a veritable
religious manner to martyrological
folklore above all empirical evidence about the causes of anti-Semitism and
the moral foundations of their Jewish homeland. The widespread Jewish refusal
to face, and remedy, the enormous
suffering the state of Israel causes non-Jewish people grossly transcends
mere oversight. It is a consciously created political program of international
Jewish elitism and it is sinister. Unfortunately, probably most of Jewish
identity and its ceaseless passion for itself truly boils down to the most
selfishly primitive of all human emotions : individual -- and in the Jewish case,
collective -- self-preservation at all, and any, moral costs. As the dominant
world view in the Jewish community, it is the complete unwillingness -- even
paralysis -- to recognize and address human suffering unless it is Jewish.
As Jewish psychotherapist Irene Bloomfield suggests,

"In its desperate fight for survival
and in becoming an occupying power,

Israel has used harsh and inhuman methods,
which would probably not

have deserved mention if used by some of
the Arab states, but torture,

oppression, and inhumanity cannot be justified
according to our own

laws, yet any criticism of Israel by outsiders
often evokes a furious and

extreme reaction on our part and is experienced
like an attack on the

family and is therefore intolerable."
[BLOOMFIELD, I., p. 28]

It has been suggested by some Jewish observers
(as reported elsewhere in this work) that anti-Jewish hostility ("anti-Semitism")
is a necessary glue to maintain the "otherness" of Jewish identity.
The World Jewish Congress noted a similar theme in 1981, that Israel's violent
tensions with the Arab world are a very crucial rallying point for Jewish
identity:

"For the preponderant part of Diaspora
Jewry whose attachment has been
to Israel, rather than to Judaism and Jewish
ways of life as such, it seems
quite clear that a comprehensive peace [with
Palestinians], given present
trends [in 1981], must be expected progressively
to result in a weakening
sense of Jewish identity, a lesser concern for
Israel and for other Jews,
and in less identification with Jewish organiations
and communal affairs."
[WALINSKY, L., 1981, p. 104]

What, one wonders, would modern Jewish identity
be without the necessary antithetical echo of non-Jewish hostility to it?
The World Jewish Congress seems to suggest what the answer might be for many
Jews: very little. Or even nothing.

*************************

A 2001 survey of Israelis by the World Jewish Congress
found that:

* 57% believed there was more anti-Semitism
in the world than 10 years earlier.
* 75% "agreed that international anti-Israel
sentiment is motivated by anti-Semitism.
* 67% "said anti-Israel politics at the
United Nations is driven by anti-Semitism.
[AXELROD, T., 10-29-01]

APPENDIX

Members of the Presidents' Conference of
Major Jewish Organizations:

American-Israel
Friendship League, American Friends of Likud, American Israel Public Affairs
Committee, American Gathering, American Jewish Committee, American Jewish
Congress, American ORT Federation, American Sephardi Organization, American
Zionist Movement, Americans for Peace
Now,
AMIT, Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, Central Conference of American
Rabbis, CAMERA, Council of Jewish Federations, Development Corporation for
Israel, Batunah of America, Friends of Israeli Defense Forces, Hadassah (Women's
Zionist Organization of America), Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Jewish Community
Centers Association, Jewish Council for Public Affairs, Jewish Institute for
National Security Affairs, Jewish Labor Committee, Jewish National Fund, Jewish
Reconstruction Federation, Jewish War Veterans of the USA, Jewish Women International,
Joint Distribution Committee, Labor Zionist Alliance, Mercaz USA, NA'AMAT
USA, National Committee for Labor Zionism, National Conference on Soviet Jewry,
National Council of Jewish Women, National Council of Young Israel, Rabbinical
Assembly, Rabbinical Council of America, Religious Zionists of America, Union
of American Hebrew Congregations, Union of Orthodox Jews, United Congregations
of America, United Israel Appeal, United Jewish Appeal, United Synagogues
of Conservative Judaism, WIZO USA, Women of Reform Judaism, Women's American
ORT, Women's League for Conservative Judaism, Women's League for Israel, Workman's
Circle, World Zionist Executives USA, Zionist Organization of America.